Chapter 4
The silence in the grand dining room became a physical, suffocating pressure. The tall ivory candles flickering inside their brass candelabras seemed to be the only things moving in the entire, luminous space. The clear, cinematic lighting left absolutely no shadows for Celeste’s cruelty to hide within.
"Did Lydia consent?" Sebastian repeated, his voice maintaining that terrifying, measured cadence. It was not a question born of curiosity; it was a deadly demand for accountability, dripping with the absolute promise of retribution.
Celeste stared up at Sebastian, her fair, rosy skin suddenly draining of all color, leaving her looking sickly and translucent. The devastating silence from the mafia boss was breaking her resolve faster than any screamed threat. She gripped the velvet fabric of her evening gown, her hands shaking violently.
"Sebastian, darling, please," Celeste gasped, her voice pitching high and breathless with panic. "You must understand. It was a matter of discipline! She was overstepping her boundaries! A maid has no right to allow your son to call her mother! I was merely asserting the proper hierarchy of this household while you were at the door!"
"Are you defining holding a woman down and mutilating her as an acceptable assertion of hierarchy, Celeste?" Sebastian inquired, his perceptive eyes narrowing into cold slits.
"She needed to learn her place!" Celeste cried, tears of sheer desperation welling in her eyes. She pointed a shaking, diamond-adorned finger at Lydia, though she shrank back under Sebastian's lethal glare. "She was parading around, trying to catch your eye! I simply removed the distraction! You cannot possibly be upset over a clumsy servant's haircut when we have guests!"
"Do you believe my position as the head of this family gives you the authority to turn my home into a torture chamber?" Sebastian asked smoothly, taking a slow, deliberate step toward her.
"I am your fiancée!" Celeste 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 am going to be the mother of that boy! I have the right to discipline the staff!"
"Does a mother punish a child's innocent affection with psychological warfare and shears?" Sebastian asked, exposing the fatal, rotting flaw in her hysterical narrative.
Celeste swallowed hard, her lies fracturing under the weight of his absolute certainty. "She is manipulating him! She wants your money, she wants your power, she wants to take my place! You can't humiliate me in front of our families over a piece of trash!"
"You humiliated yourself the moment you laid hands on a woman under my protection," Sebastian stated, his voice echoing coldly off the cream marble columns.
The word "protection" echoed off the gilded wall panels, freezing the blood of the fifty guests gathered around the tables. To claim a servant was under his personal protection elevated Lydia from a mere employee to a highly guarded asset of the syndicate.
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"Protection?" Celeste 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. "She is a maid, Sebastian! You are going to break an alliance that took two years to build over a girl who scrubs your floors? 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, Celeste?" Sebastian asked calmly.
