Chapter 125: Patience is a Virtue
The afternoon sun baked the stone terrace, but the chill coming off Polina was arctic. They’d moved from the beach to the shaded outdoor dining area, a long table groaning under a lunch of grilled fish, bitter greens, and crusty bread. The food tasted like ash in Beth’s mouth.
“So the ranch,” Polina continued, picking a thread she’d dropped an hour before. She speared an olive with her fork. “Cattle, oil rights, and… what? A side of horseback riding for tourists? Quite the pivot from your previous portfolio, Bethany.”
“It’s a legacy,” Beth said, her voice cool. “One I’m choosing to build on, not liquidate.”
Isaak, who had been mostly silent, chewing methodically, finally spoke. “Legacies are heavy. They attract attention. The kind with guns and lawyers.” He looked at Damien. “You have experience with that, I suppose. The Rossi family has certain… reputational burdens.”
Damien set his fork down. The click of silver on porcelain was precise. “I’m familiar with managing attention.”
“Managing, or attracting?” Polina smiled. “Forgive me, it’s just fascinating. Our Beth spent a decade building a fortress of legitimacy. Now she’s remarrying into a name that draws the wrong kind of spotlight. It seems counterintuitive. Unless the fortress needs a different kind of guard dog.”
Beth saw the muscle in Damien’s jaw twitch. It was the same look he’d get when his father would make a casually dismissive remark about her over dinner a lifetime ago. A tightening, a withdrawal. An old wound pressed.
“My family is my business, Polina,” Beth said, her tone dropping into the territory that meant danger. “The architecture of my life isn’t up for your review.”
“Family is business,” Polina shot back, unblinking. “That’s what you never understood. You got sentimental. You married for love the first time and let his people treat you like hired help. Now you’re doing it again, and expecting a different result. It’s a peculiar form of stubbornness.”
The air left the space. Damien went perfectly still. Beth felt the old humiliation, sharp and acidic, rise in her throat—those endless Sunday dinners at the Rossi compound, the conversations flowing in Italian around her, Sophia’s cold, appraising stares, the gifts that were always slightly too impersonal, the way they’d planned Claire’s birthday party and simply forgotten to tell her. She had been furniture. Civilian, forgettable furniture.
Damien’s voice, when it came, was low and rough, stripped of all its earlier charm. “You will not,” he said, each word a stone placed with care, “speak to her about that time. You have no right.”
“I have the right of blood,” Polina said, leaning forward. “Which is more than you had when you let it happen. Where was this version of you then? Busy?”
It was a direct hit. Beth saw the flinch, raw and undeniable, in Damien’s eyes before he could shut it down. He’d confessed that guilt to her in the dark, months ago—his greatest regret, the cancer of his past. Not the violence, not the deals, but his blindness to the quiet war his family had waged against his wife.
Beth stood up. The chair legs scraped loudly against stone.
“Enough.” The word wasn’t loud, but it carried finality. She looked down at Polina, her own green eyes glacial. “You’re digging at a scar to see if he bleeds. You think it makes you sharp. It just makes you cruel. And ignorant.”
She turned her gaze to Isaak, who was watching with an unnerving stillness. “You lost an aunt you loved. I get that. It carved something out of you. But I lost a mother and a father, and then I had to build a world out of the rubble alone. You don’t get to audit my choices from the cheap seats. And you definitely don’t get to weaponize his regrets. They’re mine to forgive. Not yours to use.”
She placed her napkin on the table. “The review is over. We’re going for a walk.”
Damien stood, a silent shadow beside her. His hand found the small of her back, not possessively, but for contact, a tether.
Polina looked up at her, a flicker of something—surprise, maybe respect—in those Arctic eyes. “Always so dramatic, Betsenka.”
“No,” Beth said, already turning. “Just done.”
They walked down the winding path toward the cypress grove, leaving the stifling atmosphere of the terrace behind. The silence between them was thick, charged. She could feel the tremor in his hand through the thin silk of her blouse.
When they were deep enough into the trees’ shadow, he stopped. He didn’t face her, staring instead at the gnarled trunk of an ancient tree.
“She wasn’t wrong,” he said, the words ripped from him.
“Don’t.”
“She was. About me. About then.” He finally turned. The pain in his expression was naked, gutting. “I did let it happen. I was so fucking busy proving I was my father’s heir, so obsessed with building my own lane so we wouldn’t need his approval… that I left you in the trenches with them. I didn’t see it. Or I chose not to.”
“Damien.”
“Hearing it from her… Christ.” He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the roots. “It’s like being diagnosed by a fucking poison-tipped dart.”
Beth stepped into his space, forcing his eyes down to hers. She put her hands on his face, her thumbs on the hard line of his jaw. “Listen to me. You don’t get to let them rewrite our history. What happened, happened. We’ve talked it into the ground. You have spent every single day since we found each other trying to make it right. I see it. I live it.”
She took a breath, the scent of sun-baked earth and cypress filling her lungs. “What matters right now is that when she swung at you, I wasn’t alone in the ring. You were right there. And when she swung at me, you didn’t just sit there. You never leave me to fend for myself anymore. That’s the difference.”
He leaned his forehead against hers, his eyes closed. The vulnerability was total. “I hate that they can still make me feel like that kid. The one who failed you.”
“They can’t,” she whispered. “Unless you let them. And you’re not.”
They stood like that for a long moment, the dappled light shifting over them. The fury slowly bled from his shoulders, replaced by a weary resolve.
A sharp crack echoed from the direction of the manor—not a gunshot, but the sound of a heavy terrace door slamming shut. Then another.
Damien’s head lifted, his eyes clearing, sharpening. The vulnerability sealed itself away behind a wall of focused intensity. He was listening, every sense extending toward the house.
“That wasn’t about lunch,” he said quietly.
Beth nodded, dropping her hands. The moment of private reckoning was over. The house had spoken. A new tension, colder and more immediate, threaded through the grove.
“No,” she said, smoothing her blouse, the steel returning to her voice. “It wasn’t. Let’s go see what finally got interesting.”