Chapter 5
The profound, ringing silence of the grand dining room settled heavily over the table. The cascading crystal chandeliers continued to cast their warm golden light, catching the terrified sweat forming on Coralie’s brow.
"Matthias, darling, please," Coralie gasped, her American accent pitching high and breathless with panic. "He is just a child! He is traumatized! The fire confused him! You cannot possibly believe a confused orphan over your future wife!"
"Does trauma grant a six-year-old boy the specific knowledge of your presence at the orphanage on the night it burned, Coralie?" Matthias asked.
His deep, controlled voice remained completely level. The measured pause between his words was a calculated instrument of psychological torture. He did not step toward her, but the sheer gravity of his masculine presence pressed her against the velvet back of her chair.
"The maid put him up to it!" Coralie cried, tears of sheer desperation welling in her eyes. She pointed a shaking, diamond-adorned finger at Ada, though she shrank back under Matthias's lethal glare. "She wants to ruin our evening! She has been filling his head with lies to poison him against me!"
"Would my son fabricate a nightmare to destroy the foundation of our alliance?" Matthias inquired, his perceptive eyes narrowing into cold slits.
"Yes! He hates me!" Coralie shrieked, looking frantically around the room at the seated capos and donors, silently begging someone—anyone—to intervene. But the elite crowd sat immobilized, their faces pale with shock, utterly unwilling to cross the mafia boss. "I have disciplined him! I have tried to make him a proper heir, and he resents me for it!"
"Is that why you have spent the entire day terrorizing the woman who saved his life?" Matthias asked, his gaze flicking briefly to Ada’s puffy, crying eyes and her rumpled, disheveled uniform. "Is this what you call discipline?"
Coralie swallowed hard, her lies fracturing under the weight of his absolute certainty. "She is a servant! She was overstepping her boundaries! I merely reminded her of her place in this household! You cannot humiliate me in front of our families over a piece of trash and a lying brat!"
"You humiliated yourself the moment you laid hands on those under my protection," Matthias stated, his voice echoing coldly off the cream marble columns.
The word "protection" froze the blood of the fifty guests gathered around the tables. To claim a servant and an adopted son were under his absolute protection elevated them from mere dependents to highly guarded assets of the syndicate.
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"Protection?" Coralie spat, her aristocratic features twisting into an ugly mask of pure, unadulterated venom. The sheer panic had finally given way to a desperate, cornered fury. "You are going to break an alliance that took two years to build over a maid who cooks pudding? My father brings the entire southern smuggling route to this table!"
"Are you under the impression that I require your father’s routes to maintain my empire, Coralie?" Matthias asked calmly.
