Lulu’s heart ached watching her mistress stand there and take it. Cassandra held her tongue out of decorum, but Lulu was only a servant. She had no reputation left to protect.
Her eyes filled with tears, but her voice held steady. "I may be just a humble maid, but I know right from wrong. You are a female general, yet you took another woman’s husband on the battlefield. And now you come here and bully my lady, hiding behind your military achievements like a shield."
She never got to finish. Adrian’s hand cracked across her face before the last word left her mouth.
He turned to Cassandra, his voice cold. "Is this what you teach your servants? There’s no respect left in this house."
Cassandra was already at Lulu’s side, one arm around her shoulders. The mark on the girl’s cheek had bloomed red in seconds, proof enough of how hard he had struck her.
She straightened, and her hand moved before she gave it permission to. The slap landed across Adrian’s face with a crack just as sharp as his own.
"Do you think you can lay a hand on my people whenever you please?"
Adrian stood frozen. No one had ever struck him back, least of all a woman, least of all his own wife, and least of all over a servant girl, in front of Aurora. A man’s face was not something a woman touched. But there was nothing he could do about it now, not without making an even bigger fool of himself in front of both women. He settled for a hard, cold look, then turned and walked out with Aurora at his side.
Cassandra cupped Lulu’s cheek in her palm. "Does it hurt?"
"Not at all." Lulu managed a smile even as her eyes watered. "It doesn’t matter. We won’t be here much longer anyway."
"The Alpha’s decree should arrive within a few days." Cassandra let out a slow breath. "I hope it comes sooner rather than later."
When Adrian had first told her about the decree granting him Aurora as a second mate, Cassandra had wanted to meet the woman for herself. Aurora was the first female general to rise through the ranks in a generation, and Cassandra had admired her for it, had even believed a woman who fought her own way to that rank would never be willing to share a man. That belief hadn’t survived the conversation in her study. What she had heard today from Aurora’s own mouth had burned every bit of that admiration down to nothing. In its place sat something colder, something closer to contempt.
The wedding was set for October, and it was already the middle of August. There was little time left to prepare, and in a household this size, only two people could be trusted to run something so large. One was Cassandra. The other was Charlotte.
Cassandra made up her mind quickly. She would give the Warren family no opening to pull her into planning her husband’s wedding to another woman. Let them ask. She would refuse before the question finished leaving their mouths.
So the task fell to Charlotte instead. She had no love for Adrian after everything he’d done, and even less patience for the whole affair, but family obligation and Amelia’s illness left her no room to say no.
The night before the engagement ceremony, Charlotte called the family together. Everyone came, Jonathan, Gregory, the younger siblings, all of them crowded into the main hall. When Rebecca insisted that Cassandra join them too, Cassandra already knew what they wanted from her. She went anyway. Some part of her wanted to see exactly how far these people were willing to go.
The Yates family had sent over a list of betrothal gifts they expected in exchange for Aurora. Charlotte had already gathered the simpler items, but a few requests on the list had her stumped, and that was the real reason for the meeting.
Jonathan took one look at the list and said flatly that it couldn’t be done.
A year earlier, when Adrian had married Cassandra, her mother Melanie had known the Warren family’s situation well. Rebecca needed medicine every day of her life, and the household had little money to spare. So Melanie had asked for almost nothing. Five hundred silver coins and a few ordinary pieces of jewelry, nothing more.
Cassandra’s own dowry told a different story entirely. Houses, estates, shops, a fortune that added up to a hundred thousand silver coins. The furniture and silk and bedding alone had been enough to fill an entire room from floor to ceiling.
For the past year, that dowry was the only reason Sebastian had kept coming to treat Rebecca, and the only reason the medicine never ran out. Without it, Rebecca likely wouldn’t have survived the first month of Adrian’s deployment, let alone the whole year.