Chapter 10
Something in my chest, tight since the moment I’d read that ledger, finally loosened.
“Dimitri’s going to keep coming,” I said. “Now I understand exactly what he wants. He’s not just after territory. He’s finishing what his father started — punishing my family through yours.”
“Then we finish it together,” Claire said, steadier than I’d heard her all week. “Not because you’re protecting me from a kitchen. Because we’re standing on the same side of this, the whole way through.”
“I love you,” I said. “In ways that have nothing to do with any of this. I need you to know that, separate from everything else.”
“I know.” She smiled, small but real. “I’ve always known that. I just needed everyone else in this house to know it too.”
Six weeks later, the house looked different — not smaller, not less grand, but lighter, the way a room feels once the wrong people have finally left it.
My mother kept her home and her allowance, exactly as promised, and nothing more. Isabella spent her days working alongside Marco’s team, tracing the last threads of Ferro Holdings until nothing remained for Dimitri Kovac to hide behind. Dimitri himself stopped being a problem anyone in Chicago needed to worry about — the details of that ending stayed exactly where they belonged, outside the walls of the house Claire and I were rebuilding.
On a Sunday evening, I found her in the kitchen again — not scrubbing dishes this time, but standing at the counter with flour on her hands, working through a recipe from a card that had survived three foster homes and one father she’d finally been allowed to grieve properly.
“You’re staring,” she said without turning around.
“I like watching you own this kitchen instead of hiding in it.”
She glanced back, flour dusting her cheek, the necklace catching the evening light exactly the way it had the night I fastened it around her neck.
I crossed the room, took her flour-covered hand in mine, and led her to the dining table — the same table where I’d once slid a folder between champagne flutes.
I pulled out the chair at the head of the table. Not beside it. At the head.
“Sit,” I said.
She looked at the chair, then at me, understanding exactly what I was offering.
“That’s your seat.”
“It’s ours,” I told her. “It always was.”
May you like
She sat down, flour still on her hands, diamonds still at her throat, and for the first time since I’d walked through that side door months ago, the house finally felt like exactly what it was always supposed to be.
Home.
