The crowd burst out laughing, as if I'd lost my mind.
Maria stepped out from behind them, unhurried, chin lifted, eyes dripping with contempt. She looked at me the way someone looks at an insect beneath their shoe.
"You really think warming a man's bed for a few nights and popping out a kid gives you the right to run your mouth at me? Get on your knees. Right now. Bow your head to the floor and beg my forgiveness, and maybe I'll have my husband toss you a few scraps. Otherwise, the consequences won't be something you or your daughter can afford."
The crowd erupted.
"Don't waste your breath on a homewrecker, Maria! She needs to be taught a lesson right here, right now, so she knows what happens when she opens that mouth!"
Someone spat at me. Others hurled insults without restraint.
My gaze went cold enough to kill. I spoke slowly, every word deliberate.
"I didn't come here to listen to you twist the truth. You're a mother who put her own son up to hurting my daughter."
"And you," I turned to Ursula, "are a teacher who abused your authority and enabled every bit of it."
I let my eyes sweep over every face in that crowd.
"Every single one of you is complicit. And I will settle the debt with each of you, down to the last cent, with interest."
WHAM.
A dull impact knocked me off balance. My knee hit the ground hard, and white-hot pain shot straight through the bone.
I looked up at the woman who had just kicked me.
She stood right beside Maria, chin raised, voice venomous.
"She told you to kneel and apologize. Are you deaf?"
I braced my hand against the ground and staggered back to my feet. When I glanced down, my white suit pants were smeared with dirt and blood.
The jeering didn't pause for even a second. If anything, it turned sharper, uglier.
The circle tightened around me. That same woman reached into her designer bag, pulled out a lipstick tube, and hurled it at me. The others followed her lead.
Wadded tissues, cups of coffee, loose coins. Anything they could throw, they threw.
"A cheap mistress who can't even show her face in polite company, and she actually thinks she's Rosalind Black? Threatening us!"
"Look at her in that little power suit, playing dress-up! All you're good at is seducing married men. Your kid's just like you. Both of you deserve every bit of this!"
The commotion drew a crowd of onlookers to the villa gates, phones raised, recording, snapping photos, whispering among themselves.
I lifted my hand and wiped the filth from my face. I straightened my jacket. Then I looked up, directly at Maria, who stood on the highest step.
"You're not some uneducated thug. Your son bullied my daughter at school. Now you're standing here watching these people attack me, verbally and physically, and doing nothing to stop it. You really think you can afford the consequences of this?"
Maria tilted her chin higher, radiating arrogance.
"I need someone's permission to put a homewrecker in her place? I'm doing God's work. You, your daughter, your whole family could walk through that door right now, and I'd make every last one of you kneel and beg. And you'd take it."
The parents around her chimed in immediately.
"You wreck someone's family, and getting hit is the least of what you deserve."
"Maria is the real CEO's wife. You think climbing into someone's bed means you've made it?"
Unbelievable. Every kind of fool crawled out of the woodwork today.
Walter had once tried to take over the parent company's operations. One look from my father sent him scurrying back with his tail between his legs.
It was me who saw a sliver of ambition in him and handed him a thousand-person subsidiary to cut his teeth on.
And somehow that had turned him into a publicly traded company's CEO in these people's eyes?
Maria's expression grew more triumphant by the second. Then her gaze dropped to my neck and her eyes turned vicious.
"You shameless wretch. You spent my husband's money on gemstones? A one-of-a-kind piece from an auction house? You think you deserve to wear that? Give it back!"
She lunged forward and grabbed the stone at my throat with her bare hands. The chain bit into my skin and tore free, leaving a line of searing pain across my neck.
She clutched the blood-smeared gem like it was a holy relic, then looked at me as though she wanted to rip me apart with her teeth.
"Something this exquisite, wasted on trash like you. And that suit, Maria, look at the cut. Must be couture. I wonder which designer she conned it out of?"
I pressed my hand against the jacket instinctively, and my voice came out cold as frost. "You'd better stop. Right now."
