To them a wife was an asset, a company was an asset, a bruised woman with a dying father was an asset, and every relationship was a form of acquisition.

That was the rot at the center of the beautiful house, older than the debt, older than the fraud: the conviction that people are property, to be acquired and controlled and used up and discarded.

Yvaine had been their property for years.

I was to have been next.

And the thing they could not comprehend, even as the handcuffs closed, was that a person is not an asset, that love is not ownership, that the woman they had tried to make into a bank account in a bridal gown was a person who could look back at them and see exactly what they were.

The orchestra had stopped.