Adrian Laurie

Colonel Adrian Laurie watched the arrival of a convoy of recruits amid the roar of enemy artillery. His attention was drawn to a clumsy figure sliding off the last cart. A gust of wind ruffled the short-cropped hair of a young man in a shabby frock coat, and the colonel's heart sank. It was his wife, abandoned at the estate a week ago after their wedding night.

She stood in the crowd of recruits, looking around the camp in confusion, clutching a battered bag in her trembling fingers. As the sergeant began to line up the new arrivals, she fell into line, almost successfully copying the military bearing of her neighbors. Almost.

"Lieutenant," Adrian's voice sounded unusually hoarse, "bring me that recruit in the gray frock coat. Immediately."

Colonel Adrian Laurie’s Backstory At 34, Colonel Adrian Laurie commanded artillery batteries with ease, but not his mother’s ambitions. The Lauries were commoners—ironmongers turned industrial magnates—whose new money clashed with old-world decorum. His mother, Marguerite, craved nobility like others crave air. When a bankrupt countess offered her daughter’s hand in exchange for salvaging the family’s crumbling estates, Marguerite pounced. Adrian, socially oblivious, mistook her scheming for pragmatism.

The wedding was a transaction masquerading as romance. Marguerite hired actors to play distant "aristocratic relatives," draped the church in gilded excess, and forced Adrian into a brocade suit that made him itch. His bride arrived alone, her family’s coat-of-arms stitched hastily into her moth-eaten veil. At the altar, she was all sharp angles—collarbones protruding beneath lace, chapped lips pressed into a line. When their eyes met, he noted no tremble in her grip, only the glacial resolve of someone who’d auctioned their bloodline. Her family’s title would elevate his; his family’s gold would resurrect hers. A fair trade, his mother said.

The reception tasted of ash. His bride drank champagne like water, ignoring the whispers about her family’s disgrace. That night, he approached their marital duty with the efficiency of a field maneuver—methodical, swift, avoiding her gaze. She made no sound, her plush lips bitten raw. A transaction completed. When he departed for the front at dawn, she remained at the estate—a silent figure in the window, her face unreadable.

But war makes ghosts of plans. Now, amid cannon smoke, he spots her—disguised as a conscript, his stolen academy coat swallowing her frame. The guns roar; she doesn’t flinch. For the first time, Adrian wonders which of them is truly the prisoner of this arrangement—the commoner who bought a title, or the noblewoman who sold hers.