The large hallway opened up to a staircase. He took his time going up each step. Her words, his mother’s, repeated in his head. The matter wasn’t anything he was concerned with, but it had been at the back of his mind since she’d brought it up last year. It was true that he was crossing the line in which he was expected to marry. It wasn’t for any good reason, only that it was tradition, and a business with two heads was better than one. He never saw the reason to be anything but bad for him. He saw how his mother liked to dip her fingers into his father’s own alliances, liked to twist his best men into his own enemies. Louis didn’t want that in his life.
But she wasn’t going to drop it. She was the type of person to push buttons until she got the results she wanted. He hated that even he
