That very morning, in fact, and by his lover Cathy Montaigne.

"I think Mommy was right," whispered Berry. "You should have worn your uniform."

"They put me on half-pay," he growled. "I'm supposed to wear that silly dress uniform—most uncomfortable thing I own—afterward? Like a poodle sitting up to beg forgiveness?"

Berry's nervous glances at the guards in the hallway were now definitely furtive, especially the glance she cast at the four soldiers following them a few steps behind. Clearly enough, the teenage girl was half-expecting the Queen's Own Regiment to arrest them on the spot for...

Whatever fancy legal phrase covered: charged with being the stubborn disrespectful lout Anton Zilwicki and his adopted daughter.

"The Queen didn't put you on the beach," she hissed hastily, as if that disclaimer might possibly establish her own innocence. "That's what Mommy kept saying to you this morning. I heard her. She was pretty loud."

The thing that flashed immediately through Anton's mind was a soft pleasure at Berry's use of the term Mommy to refer to Cathy Montaigne. Technically, of course, she wasn't. Berry and her brother Lars had been adopted by Anton, and since he and Cathy were not married the most that Cathy could officially be called was...

Again, his lips twitched. Daddy's girlfriend, maybe. Paramour, if you wanted to be fancy about it. "Anton's squeeze" was the term Cathy herself enjoyed using in proper company. The former Countess of the Tor took a childish pleasure in seeing pained expressions on the faces of polite society.

For Berry and Lars, born and raised in the hellhole of the Old Quarter on Earth's capital city of Chicago, the legalities were meaningless. Since Anton's daughter Helen had found and rescued them from the catacombs, Berry and Lars had found the first real family they'd ever had. And Anton was glad to see the ease with which that knowledge now came to them.