She’s a Kane. You’re the housekeeper’s son. Underneath the silk, you’re always beneath.
I breathe through it. Doesn’t go. I breathe again. Doesn’t matter. I’m already moving.
The car slides us into Midtown traffic as my death grip intensifies on the phone.
I don’t want to call her. If I hear her voice now, the part of me that listens will drown out the part of me that remembers driveways and engagement parties that erased me from her life. I tell myself a dozen reasonable things about optics and grace and how to walk into a room without setting it on fire.
And then I walk into the room and set it on fire.
The maître d’ murmurs my name with reverence and a question.
I don’t answer.
I find them without being shown because trouble announces itself: heads angled like flowers to sunlight, a hush that isn’t reverence, a pattern of phones being raised and lowered by people who will swear they weren’t taking photos.
Harrison sits with his back to the door—coward’s habit dressed as swagger—but he turns before I reach the table because men like him can smell fury at twenty paces. His smile widens, perfect as dentistry and twice as expensive.
“Vasso,” he purrs, like we’re best pals. “Join us. We were just discussing family values.”
“Leave,” I say, low enough that the tablecloth trembles.
He breaks a breadstick in half and places one piece on my side of the table like a communion. “You don’t say please to the father of your?—”
“Don’t,” Naomi says, and her voice cuts through the velvet. She’s steady. There’s a pulse in her throat and steel under her hand where it rests on the napkin. “I asked you to leave already. I will ask again once, and then I will call the manager.”
He glances at her hand, back to me, delighted. “You taught her tone, Vasso. Shame you can’t teach her loyalty.”
My vision narrows at the edges, tight and bright. “Get up.”
He leans back. “Or what? You’ll drag me out? Cameras would love that.Billionaire thug ejects father-in-law.” He rolls the last word around like candy. “That’s what you are now, isn’t it? In-law.”
“Law,” Theodore says mildly, “doesn’t enter the relationship.”
Harrison’s mouth flicks. “You would know.”
“You came here to peacock,” I say. “You’ve been calling trustees and whispering to men who like the sound of their own worries. You wanted a scene. Congratulations. This is yourscene. It can go as smoothly or as roughly as you wish. I would accept that you’re done and strive for the former.”
He spreads his hands. “All I want is a fair shake. A seat at the table. To be treated with respect by the child who bears my name and the boy who changed the one he shouldn’t have.”
A snarl builds in my throat and I move.
Naomi’s hand touches my wrist—light, an anchor. “No,” she says, and that single syllable leashes me better than a room full of security. Her eyes hold mine, bright and furious. “It’s exactly what he wants. He loves a scandal, remember? Not like this.”
“Not like what?” Harrison chirps. “Like a man? Like someone who understands how power works?” He sniffs the air. “What is that scent? Self-righteousness? Or is it poverty remembering how to sweat?”
The old voice in my head—beneath, beneath, beneath—rises like a tide.
The newer voice, forged in boardrooms and nights I slept on floors beside a mother who cried quietly, answers with a lesson I paid for in blood.
You don’t swing at gossips. You bury them.
I look at Naomi because coming here was a decision I made with my temper; what I do next has to be a decision I make with my head. “Did you invite him?”
“No,” she says, fierce, resolute.Truth.
“He sat, uninvited. He always sits where he isn’t wanted,” Theodore corroborates.
Her fingers tighten on my wrist once, then shift to my hand, interlacing—small, deliberate violence against the lie in my head. “I texted Mara. She told me you’d already left. Please don’t?—”
