It was so that there would be no back door, no sympathetic banker, no fresh line of credit through which the old Marius — the persuasive one, the one who had nearly erased me — could ever reconstitute himself.

I was not building a dungeon.

I was removing the ladders.

A man cannot climb back to a balcony to push you off it if you have quietly bought every ladder in the city.

That is the difference between revenge and security, and it took me the whole ordeal to learn it: revenge wants him to suffer, and security simply wants him to never again be in a position to matter.

I wanted the second thing.