The Springshaper estate didn't look like the home of the largest necromantic corporation in the Empire.
I'd half expected black stone and bone-white gates. Instead, the road wound up through long terraces of glasshouses, their panes misted on the inside, rows of pale night-blooming flowers pressed against the glass like faces at a window. Springshaper botany, three generations of it. Everyone knew the family had been agricultural innovators long before the pivot to necromancy made them rich, but it was another thing to drive past the evidence: they had never stopped growing things.
'Nervous?' Luna asked.
'No.'
'You've straightened your collar four times.'
'I'm meeting my girlfriend's father,' I said, 'to ask him to hand over the company he spent twenty-seven years building. I'm allowed to straighten my collar.'
'Just checking you understood the situation.'
A butler met me at the door and did not take me to the Marquis.
