" Perhaps it’s time you stopped sulking over an engagement three years broken and bore yourself like a man!” The duke’s voice snaps like a whip. “Zeus and Hera, how did I beget such an unruly son?”
“If you’ve forgotten, perhaps you could summon up the dead and ask my lady mother.”
The duke barks a laugh. “You got that tongue from her, that’s for certain. But she was obedient to me for all her carping.”
“Obedient?” says Lord Anax. The desk creaks and shifts; I think he is leaning against it. “We must remember her very differently.”
“Always when it counted, my boy, which is more than can be said of you. I wanted that girl for my daughter, you know.”
“Adopt her, then. I believe it’s legal.”
“First I’d have to kill her parents,” says the duke, “and I am given to understand that’s frowned upon these days.”
“It’s gone the same sad way as the right of a father to execute his sons. "
― Rosamund Hodge , Gilded Ashes