The next morning, the confrontation was quiet, bloodless, and entirely brutal.
Beatrice sat behind a massive oak desk in the morning room, a simple white shawl draped over her shoulders to ward off the northern chill. Hastings stood before her, sweating through his collar despite the cold. Darius was leaning in the doorway, a book in his hand that he had not looked at once in the last hour.
Beatrice had a pen in one hand and was tracing a line down a column of numbers in the heavy, leather-bound ledger. She stopped. She tapped the pen against the paper.
"Mr. Hastings," she said softly.
"Yes, Your Grace?"
"The estate is currently purchasing its winter coal from a supplier in Leeds."
"Yes, Your Grace. A trusted supplier. We have used them for a decade."
Beatrice turned the book around and pushed it across the desk. "You are paying three shillings a ton above the current market rate. Furthermore, the transport costs listed here do not account for the fact that the new rail line reduced cartage fees two years ago. By my estimation, you are overpaying by roughly £400 a year."
Hastings turned purple. He stammered, his eyes darting frantically toward Darius in the doorway. "Your Grace, I assure you, the relationships with these suppliers are complex—"
"They are not complex; they are lazy," Beatrice cut him off, her voice cracking like a whip. She didn't raise her voice; she didn't have to. "I do not care about a decade of precedent, Mr. Hastings. We are not running a charity for merchants in Leeds. You will renegotiate this contract by Friday, or I will terminate it and find a new supplier myself. Is that understood?"
Hastings stared at the terrifyingly competent woman sitting in the Duke's chair. He swallowed hard. The patronizing smirk was entirely gone, replaced by a sudden, terrifying respect.
"Understood, Your Grace."
"Excellent. Now, let us discuss the laundry soap expenditure. It seems wildly inflated for a staff of this size."
When Hastings finally fled the room an hour later, clutching his ledgers like a shield, Beatrice dropped the pen and rubbed her temples. A dull headache was beginning to form behind her eyes.
She heard the soft thud of footsteps on the rug. Darius walked up behind her chair. He placed a large, warm hand on her shoulder, his thumb pressing firmly into the knot of tension at the base of her neck.
"You terrified him," Darius said. His voice was thick with amusement, and something much deeper.
Beatrice leaned back slightly into his touch, closing her eyes. "He was stealing from you, Darius. Not maliciously—just through sheer complacency. People assume because you have so much, you won't notice the leaks."
"I notice," Darius murmured, his hand moving down to rest over hers on the desk. "I just never had anyone who cared enough to patch the holes."
Beatrice opened her eyes and looked at their hands: his skin darker, scarred from his time in the cavalry, resting securely over her pale, ink-stained fingers.
"I am not wallpaper anymore, am I?" she whispered.
Darius leaned down, pressing a slow, deliberate kiss to the crown of her head. "No, Beatrice. You are the entire house."
The honeymoon phase for Beatrice and Darius did not consist of stolen kisses in rose gardens or whispered poetry on balconies; Yorkshire in November did not permit such frivolities. It consisted of long evenings by the fire, boots muddy from inspecting tenant farms, and the quiet, solid work of building a life.
But even fortresses have ghosts.
It was a month into their marriage. A violent squall had rolled off the moors, rattling the thick glass of the manor windows and howling down the chimneys. The house was freezing despite the roaring fires.
Beatrice woke up at 3:00 in the morning. The massive four-poster bed was half-empty; the sheets on Darius's side were cold. She didn't ring for a maid. She threw a heavy wool dressing gown over her nightshift, pushed her bare feet into her slippers, and walked out into the dark, echoing corridor.
She found him in the library. It was a cavernous room, walled with thousands of books, smelling of old leather and damp stone. A single fire burned low in the hearth.
Darius was standing by the massive window, looking out into the pitch-black storm. He held a glass of whiskey, but he wasn't drinking it. He was dressed only in his trousers and a loose linen shirt, his shoulders rigid, bearing an invisible weight.