Chapter 3
My mother’s hand found her wine glass and gripped it without drinking.
“You don’t understand what you’re accusing me of.”
“I understand exactly what I’m accusing you of,” I said. “I just don’t understand why yet.”
Behind me, I heard the kitchen door creak.
Claire stood in the frame, gloves gone, hands still raw, watching a room full of people who’d spent six weeks deciding she wasn’t worth a seat — watching them go pale in front of a name she’d never once heard.
“Luca.”
Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“What is Ferro Holdings?”
I turned the folder to the last page — the one I hadn’t shown anyone yet, the one with a name on it that had nothing to do with my mother.
And for the first time all night, my hands weren’t steady when I answered her.
“It’s a company your father used to know,” I said.
Claire’s face changed — not confusion. Something colder.
“My father’s been dead for eighteen years, Luca. He never knew anyone with money like this.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
She crossed the room, past my mother, past Isabella, and stood beside me at the table. She looked down at the last page in the folder — a scanned ledger entry, decades old, my father’s handwriting cramped along the margin.
Protection detail — D.B.
“D.B.,” she said slowly.
“I don’t know yet.” It was the truth. I hadn’t let myself finish the thought in the car. “I need you to sit down before we go any further with this.”
“I don’t want to sit down. I want to know why my dead father’s initials are next to a company that’s been funding the man trying to kill you.”
My mother made a small sound at the head of the table — not quite a word, more like something catching in her throat.
I looked at her.
“You know something.”
“I don’t—”
“Vivienne.”
Claire’s voice cut across the table, steady in a way I hadn’t heard from her all night.
“Look at me and tell me you don’t know anything about my father.”
My mother’s eyes lifted, and for the first time since I’d walked into that room, she looked less like a woman caught and more like a woman drowning.
“Sit down,” she said quietly. “Both of you. This is not a conversation for a room full of guests.”
I turned to the room. Most of the guests had already found excuses to be elsewhere — coats being gathered, cars being pulled around, the particular scramble of people who understand exactly when a party has ended even if nobody’s said the words. Within ten minutes the dining room held only five of us: my mother, Isabella, Claire, myself, and Marco, who’d let himself in through the side door the second word reached him that I was home early.
“Talk,” I said to my mother.
May you like
She looked at her wineglass like it might answer for her.
“Ferro Holdings was your father’s,” she started. “Before you took over. Before you even knew what this family really was.”
