Chapter 8
The silence in the grand dining room settled heavily over the banquet table. The cascading crystal chandeliers continued to cast their warm golden light, catching the terrified sweat forming on Rosalind’s brow.
"Damien, darling, please," Rosalind gasped, her American accent pitching high and breathless with panic. "You must understand! It was a joke! A harsh joke, perhaps, but she was never actually going to put them on! I wouldn't have let her!"
"Does a joke involve deceiving my six-year-old son into handling shattered glass?" Damien 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 back against her velvet chair.
"He wasn't supposed to touch it!" Rosalind cried, tears of sheer desperation welling in her eyes. "He was supposed to stay upstairs! The maid dragged him down here to ruin our evening!"
"Would my son fabricate his excitement over uncovering your malice?" Damien inquired, his perceptive eyes narrowing into cold slits.
"She is manipulating him!" Rosalind 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. "She let him call her mother! She is overstepping her boundaries, Damien! You have to see that!"
"Is that why you have spent the entire day terrorizing her?" Damien asked, his gaze flicking briefly to Alice’s puffy, crying eyes and her rumpled, disheveled uniform. "Is this how you intend to rule beside me?"
Rosalind swallowed hard, her lies fracturing under the weight of his absolute certainty. "I am your fiancée! We are supposed to unite our syndicates! You cannot humiliate me in front of our families over a piece of trash!"
"You humiliated yourself the moment you laid a trap for a woman under my protection," Damien 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 was under his absolute protection elevated her from a mere employee to a highly guarded asset of the syndicate.
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"Protection?" Rosalind 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? 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, Rosalind?" Damien asked calmly.
