"Exactly! No wonder I thought you carried yourself like real blood the moment I laid eyes on you. That's the grace only old money breeds, the kind you can't fake."
"We all came to stand behind you today. We're respectable women, made-men's wives, and we won't let some low-born kept woman throw her weight around among us."
"Right! What can you expect from the daughter of a homewrecker? Nico, now there's true Valente stock. Already standing up for his own people, and him so young."
The praise rolled off the women like incense smoke in the marble foyer of the school, that exclusive place where the children of made men and associates were polished into the next generation. Even the teacher abandoned what little dignity her position afforded her, bending low at the waist of her pride to fawn over Gemma.
"Gemma, only tell me which dishes little Nico favors, and I'll see the menu reworked to his taste from this day forward. Whatever he likes."
Gemma drank it in the way a woman drinks champagne she did not pay for, her chin lifting, her fingers drifting up to the diamonds resting cold against her throat. She touched them lightly, turning them in the light, as though the stones themselves could speak the name her blood never earned.
Salvatore had fed off my Family for years, a man pulled out of the gutter and given a name that was never his to begin with. To give the man something to do with his idle hands, I had handed him the smallest crew the Valente Family owned, a scrap of territory hardly worth the soldiers who watched it.
I never imagined that scrap would become the throne this woman believed she sat upon.
The moment they saw me, the wives who had been cooing over Gemma a breath earlier turned as one. Their faces curdled. They looked at me the way the devout look at something dragged in from an alley, something filthy and contagious, something that did not belong inside these walls of imported stone and bought respectability.
The teacher came toward me, and the warmth she had lavished on Gemma was gone, scraped clean from her features. Her voice was flat and rehearsed. "Ms. Valente, I've been instructed by the headmaster to inform you that Isabella is cast out of the school's circle, effective immediately."
I held her gaze, and when I spoke my voice was quiet enough to make her lean in to catch it. "My daughter was attacked. Maimed, on your grounds, under your watch. And instead of finding justice for her, you've come to throw her out."
The teacher answered without a flicker, as if reciting tribute owed. "This is an elite institution. Every child who passes through these doors comes from wealth, from rank, from proper Family blood. A child got on a homewrecker like you, kept here, would only soil the school's good name."
The room went still around the word. Somewhere behind me a soldier in a dark suit shifted his stance near the door, the slow weight of a man who heard an insult that would have to be answered. The wives felt it without understanding it, the way cattle feel a storm before the sky breaks. My expression cooled until there was nothing left in it but ice, and I warned her, soft and certain.
"I'd suggest you learn exactly who the real homewrecker is, and exactly whose child is the bastard, before you let another word past your teeth. For your own sake."
I had barely finished when Gemma came across the foyer at me, her heels striking the marble like gunfire in a tomb.
She slapped me hard across the face.
The crack of it rang off the cold stone and hung there. Heat bloomed across my cheek, sharp and humiliating, and for one long second the whole foyer held its breath, the wives frozen mid-smirk, the teacher's mouth half open, that soldier by the door gone very, very still.
"How dare a filthy homewrecker like you parade yourself in front of me?" Gemma's hand flew back to her throat, fingers closing around the cold diamonds as though they were a lifeline, as though the stones could swear to a claim her blood never could. "Did you really believe whelping some bastard would let you steal my place? That you could ever stand where I stand as Salvatore's true Donna?"
