The servants had brought them back dressed.
That was the first thing the merchant's son noticed when Cang opened the guest chamber doors and gestured inside—not with a word, not with a threat, simply a tilt of his chin that carried the weight of an imperial summons.
Meiling and Xiao Hua sat within, re-draped in their respective garments. Meiling in the layered blue silk of a merchant's respected wife, Xiao Hua still half-sewn into the red of a bridal dress that had not seen a wedding bed so much as a battlefield.
They were dressed.
They were also ruined.
Meiling sat with the particular stillness of a woman whose body had made peace with catastrophe before her mind had.
Her thick frame, the kind of mature weight that came from decades of good eating and two children and a comfortable station, had settled into a posture of absolute defeat—shoulders curved inward, heavy chest rising in small controlled breaths, hands folded in her lap with white-knuckled precision.
