“Ah,” Harrison says, savoring. “She tells your assistant before she tells you. There’s that loyalty again.”
“Enough.” The word leaves me colder than I feel, and it makes him blink. “You want respect?” I lean a knuckle on the linen and lower my voice until his smile frays at the edges. “Respect is earned. You spent yours like cash on women who liked your watch. You forged a signature and called it strategy. You’ve been waddling from one mess to another while everyone but you paid the bill.”
He lifts his breadstick stub like a salute. “And now you get to pay.” A glance at Naomi. “Unless my daughter finally remembers what tribe she belongs to.”
“She remembers,” Theodore says quietly, “and it isn’t yours.”
A hush ripples.
Harrison laughs because that’s the only music he knows. “Touching. Let’s make a counteroffer, since you love deals, Vasso. Twenty million dollars and I stop educating your investors about the fragility of your house. Or—” his smile slides toward me “—bring me into the company. Title, optics, a seat at the table a father-in-law deserves.”
“I told you no last week. The answer is still no,” Naomi says, and the word lands like a plate set down with intent. “You will not work for my husband. You will not stand beside him in any room I have to enter. You will not use my name or my ring as currency.”
He arches a brow. “Husband. Ring.” He clicks his tongue. “Adorable words when everyone knows you’re running a season-long pageant.”
Heat spikes up my spine. “We’re done.”
“Almost.” He laces his fingers, leans in, voice dropping to theater whisper. “You can stop this so easily, Princess. You always could. Choose me. Again. The way you did when you left your little gardener standing in the driveway while you rode off to be a Goldstein.”
Old pain: knife, twist, salt. He knows exactly where to jab. He looks at me because he enjoys jabbing more when he can watch the bruise form. I don’t flinch. I’ve bled out of that wound. There’s a scar there now, not a mouth.
Naomi stands.
The chair hushes back. The room watches like a jury. She reaches into her bag and places a folder on the white linen. Then a phone. Then a small digital recorder that looks like it belongs to an assistant and instead belongs to a woman who let herself be taught.
“You like tables,” she says, calm in a way that makes my skin tighten. “Let’s set one.”
Harrison’s gaze flicks down and back, derisive. “Props?”
“Receipts,” she says, and the word is a bell. She slides the courier log forward, taps a line with a fingernail. “This shows you signed for the necklace you extorted from me, at your temporary address on East 63rd. Even your courier knows what handwriting looks like when it’s been practicing charm for fifty years.”
He laughs, though his fingers curl. “A gift from a daughter to a father. Touching.”
“Extortion,” she corrects. One tap: the PDF on her phone lights up with timestamps and texts, his threats captured in the voice of a man who thinks ‘please’ is for other people. She scrolls slow. The color slides from his face like water leaving a basin. “I can route this to counsel and the DA within the hour. Or we can play something better for dessert.”
She clicks the recorder. His voice pours into the crowded quiet with the ease of a man who never believed in consequences.
Smooth things over with that upstart husband of yours and get me a position in his company
…Or I leak everything.
Tell everyone your marriage is temporary.
Twenty million and I go away.
You’re very easy to play.
He goes very still. The room breathes him in, then out, like a scent gone sour.
“Turn it off,” he says, softer, real threat returning now that the performance stumbles. “You won’t like me cornered.”
“I don’t like you uncornered,” she says, and my heart does something ugly and perfect. “And I’m done arranging my life around your tantrums.”
He looks to me for rescue because men like him always assume men like me will look out for them out of species loyalty. “Tell your wife to stop recording crimes she goaded me into. Tell her to respect?—”
“Respect,” I say, “doesn’t enter the relationship.” I keep my gaze on Naomi because I need her to feel the thing I can’t say in a restaurant.
I see you. I believe you. I am not walking out.
