Chapter 4
Miriam stood.
Slowly.
No one helped her.
She did not need help this time.
Evelyn watched with contempt.
My mother looked small beside the marble columns and men in tailored suits.
That had always been her weapon.
People mistook modesty for weakness.
“You never liked me either,” Miriam said.
Evelyn laughed.
“This is not about you.”
“It has always been about women like me.”
I looked at my mother.
She continued.
“My husband married a schoolteacher.”
That was how she still described herself.
Not matriarch.
Not widow of Carlo Carbone.
Schoolteacher.
“My father told him it was beneath the family,” she said. “Old captains said I would embarrass him. Then Alessia was born.”
Evelyn rolled her eyes.
“Ancient history.”
“No.”
Miriam looked at me.
“It’s repeating.”
That caught me.
She explained something my father never told me.
When Carlo died, several older men did not want me to inherit the organization.
I was twenty-three.
A woman.
Unmarried.
Too young.
Too direct.
My father had expected resistance.
So before he died, he asked Miriam to do one thing.
Stand beside me publicly.
Not because she held formal command.
Because the old captains respected Carlo’s widow enough that her presence told them his household remained united behind his daughter.
I stared at her.
“You never told me.”
“You were already carrying enough.”
That answer irritated me.
She saw it.
“I know.”
Good.
No pretending.
Miriam continued.
“Some men never accepted it.”
I looked toward Vale.
He lowered his eyes.
“And when I married Garrett?”
Evelyn answered.
“They saw correction.”
There it was.
Not a romance.
An opportunity.
Garrett had been presented to old factions as the masculine center they believed the Carbone organization lacked.
I looked at him.
“Did you know before we married?”
His face tightened.
“Not all of it.”
Wrong answer.
“How much?”
“Enough to know some captains preferred me.”
My chest hurt.
Not because he had ambition.
Because he let me marry him without knowing my marriage was being sold as a political transition.
“You loved me?”
He looked offended.
“Of course.”
Miriam answered before I could.
“Love that needs her smaller is not love.”
Garrett turned toward her.
“This is why nobody wanted you at the table.”
I stood.
His face changed.
I did not hit him.
I did not need to.
“You still haven’t learned.”
He frowned.
I looked toward my mother.
“The woman you kicked is the reason half these men accepted my chair in the first place.”
May you like
Then I looked back at him.
“And you thought putting her on the floor would put you above me.”
