Chapter 2
The gentle warmth of the chandelier lighting seemed to freeze as Sebastian’s eyes remained fixed on Tessa’s trembling form. The artistic, refined linework tattoos on his hands and fingers flexed slightly as his grip tightened on the edge of the mahogany table. The generous spacing of the ink across his knuckles highlighted the sheer, masculine power of his hands, and the small artistic tattoo on his neck pulsed visibly with the sudden tension in his jaw.
Daphne, noticing the sudden, suffocating silence radiating from the man beside her, followed his gaze. Her eyes landed on the housemaid, then flicked toward the sleeve where the bruise had been momentarily exposed. Instead of showing concern, a cold, calculating glimmer flashed across Daphne’s fair face.
She turned back to Sebastian, looking directly into his cold, intimidating eyes. She offered a composed, almost defiant smile, leaning slightly closer to him.
"Your orders," Daphne said, her American accent casually dismissive, pitching her voice so only he could hear it over the ambient noise of the party. "I followed them."
Sebastian’s sharply defined jaw tightened so fiercely that the muscles ticked beneath his neatly trimmed beard. The world around him seemed to slow down. He had never, in his entire tenure as the head of the Vale family, ordered the physical abuse of his domestic staff. It was a line he explicitly forbade his capos from crossing. To hear it claimed that he had sanctioned the beating of a woman under his roof was a profound, catastrophic insult.
Tessa stood paralyzed just two feet away, her expressive eyes wide with absolute terror. She pressed her injured right wrist hard against her white apron, treating it as if it were a shameful secret rather than the evidence of a brutal assault. She looked between the Mafia boss and his fiancée, her chest heaving with silent, suppressed panicked breaths.
"Is this... what you believe?" Sebastian asked, his voice a quiet rumble that began to cut through the ambient noise of the surrounding tables.
"Please, sir," Tessa whispered, her voice cracking as she took another half-step backward. "I... I shouldn't have dropped the glass in the kitchen. I'm sorry."
Sebastian rose slowly from his chair.
The movement was unhurried, but it carried the overwhelming, intimidating weight of an apex predator asserting his dominance. He kept his tattooed hands open and visible at his sides. The moment he stood, the dynamic of the entire lavish engagement dinner shifted instantly.
Every single guest in the vast room—dozens of ruthless, wealthy white American adults—stopped eating. Conversations died mid-sentence. The clinking of crystal glasses ceased entirely. Two hundred pairs of eyes turned toward the head table in dead silence.
Sebastian stepped around his chair, closing the distance between himself and the maid. He towered over her, yet he made no aggressive moves. He simply looked down into Tessa’s frightened, expressive eyes.
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"Tessa," Sebastian said, his deep, controlled voice echoing clearly in the sudden, breathless quiet of the grand hall. "What orders?"
Tessa hesitated, her breath catching in her throat. She searched his angular, handsome face, looking for the monster she had been told he was, but finding only a terrifying, intense demand for the truth.
