The steel band was the first sentence of the story told in my own hand.

It took the precise shape of their cruelty — the jagged line of the shorn hair — and refused to let it mean what they had intended.

They had meant it as a mark of my destruction.

I made it a crown.

That is a power that has nothing to do with money or patents or the law, and I think it is the one that frightened Marius most when he finally saw it on the atrium screen: not that I owned his company, but that I had taken the worst thing he and his mistress could do to me and worn it, on purpose, as ornament.

You cannot control a person who has decided that your cruelty is a gift she can repurpose.