Chapter 9
Celia called Ruby’s removal protection.
I refused the word.
“She was never in danger here.”
“She was surrounded by instability.”
“Created by you.”
She smiled.
“You sound like your mother.”
That stopped me.
My mother died when I was sixteen.
Victor looked away.
He remembered something.
I saw it.
“What?”
He shook his head.
I stepped closer.
“What do you know?”
Celia answered.
“Your mother tried to do what you are doing.”
I stared at her.
“Meaning?”
“Modernize.”
She said it like a disease.
My mother had always been described as gentle.
Private.
Uninterested in Mafia structure.
Apparently that version had been curated too.
Celia continued.
“She wanted household staff removed from family surveillance. She wanted wives to control their own money. She wanted children kept out of succession discussions until adulthood.”
Every sentence sounded reasonable.
Which explained why my father hated it.
“What happened?”
Victor spoke.
“She lost.”
I looked at him.
His voice was quieter now.
“Dad isolated her.”
Celia frowned.
“Your father protected the house from division.”
Victor laughed bitterly.
“She stopped eating with us.”
I remembered.
I had been young enough to accept the explanation that she was ill.
Maybe she was.
Maybe the illness had a cause nobody named.
Ruby shifted against me.
I looked at Celia.
“You want to repeat that with my daughter?”
“She would have been raised properly.”
“By who?”
“Family.”
“No.”
My voice hardened.
“By people who think fear is an inheritance.”
That landed.
Celia stood.
“You think you are the first Ferraro to say these things?”
“No.”
I glanced at Victor.
“Apparently my mother said them before me.”
That changed him.
I saw it.
For years Victor resented me as the younger brother who inherited the chair.
Now he was being forced to remember the woman who raised us under the same father Dominic worshipped.
Celia noticed too.
“Don’t romanticize her.”
Victor stared.
“You called her weak.”
“She was.”
“She was miserable.”
“She was disobedient.”
There.
One word.
Disobedient.
Not sick.
Not fragile.
Not unsuitable.
Disobedient.
I looked at Victor.
He looked back.
Something old and ugly passed between us.
Our father’s house had been teaching the same lesson for decades.
Obey.
May you like
Or be rewritten.
Victor had almost helped them rewrite me.
