The pristine Bentley, only that morning a thing of polished perfection, was beaten down to a carcass of crumpled steel and shattered glass under the parking lot's white lights.
At that moment one of the women wrenched open the trunk and gasped, her voice climbing with greedy delight. "Look! There's a fortune of expensive things hidden in here!"
Gemma drifted closer, the gems at her throat catching the light as she lifted a hand to graze them, the way she always did when she wanted the world to remember who she believed she was. She drew out a canvas and held it at arm's length, lip curling. "A woman who earns her keep on her back, collecting art? Trying to dress herself up as something refined?
"It's an insult for filth like you to so much as touch something like this.
"Trash like you only deserves trash."
With that she tore the painting across the middle, right before my eyes, the canvas screaming as it split. She ripped it again and again until it was ribbons, then flung the remains to the asphalt and ground her heel into them with slow, theatrical pleasure.
One of the onlookers, a man who fancied he knew something about art, crouched and squinted at the wreckage. His face went pale. "This looks like a genuine James. I heard the bidding on his work starts at three hundred million."
Gemma laughed, brazen and bright. "So what if it's worth three hundred million? It's all my husband's money anyway.
"My husband's money is my money. If I feel like destroying my own things, who's going to tell me no?"
Her words left me mute with a rage so cold it hardly felt like rage at all. The whispering circle of these wives, these associates' women, pressed in around her like moths, and not one of them sensed how thin the ice beneath their feet had grown.
Let no one mistake the truth of it. Salvatore had crawled up out of the gutter with nothing. I had married him, lifted him, handed him a single minor crew to command and a borrowed title to wear in public, and even that he had nearly bled dry through sheer incompetence, losing the Family half its laundered worth before I reined him in. Were he not bound to me by the blood oath sworn before the Family, I would have stripped his rank long ago and let the soldiers escort him back to whatever hole he came from.
Yet Gemma and these fawning parents looked upon him as though he were the true Boss, the great Don of the Valente name. Every last one of them gazed at him with that hungry admiration reserved for power they could never touch.
Following Gemma's lead, the others fell upon what remained in the trunk. They tore at my paintings, smashed the collectibles, scattered jade and gilt across the oil-stained ground like children loosed in a vault. I had bought these pieces only hours ago, paid dearly for them at a private auction the Family kept watch over. They were not even unwrapped before these animals reduced them to refuse.
I watched them unravel, every one of them drunk on a power that was borrowed and would soon be called in. Calmly, I lifted my phone.
"Why are you not here yet?" My voice did not rise. It never had to. "You will be standing in front of me within five minutes."
Before any answer could come, a woman lunged and tore the phone from my hand, hurling it to the concrete where the screen burst into a web of glass.
"Calling for help, are you? Where do you find the nerve?"
"Acting like you're somebody important, is that it?"
"She's ringing up one of her clients to come put on a little show for us!" Laughter rolled through the lot, ugly and loud.
I looked down at the ruined phone glittering at my feet, and when I spoke my tone was quiet enough that the nearest of them leaned in to catch it. "I hope you're all still laughing this hard in a few minutes."
Something in the words made the laughter falter for half a breath before it surged back, defiant.
Then I turned to the teacher, the woman who held court over a school built for the children of made men, where rank among the parents was the only law that mattered. "You knew my daughter was being hurt under your roof. Didn't you?"
The teacher met my gaze with open contempt, her chin high. "And what if I did?
"The bastard whelp of a worthless kept woman is nothing but garbage.
"Nico was only taking out the trash. Where's the harm in that?"
