Chapter 88: A Piece of My Mind!
The morning after was always a strange, suspended thing in the Rossi compound. The grandeur felt heavier, the silence more accusing. Beth found herself in the east garden, a manicured stretch of rose bushes and slate paths that felt less like a retreat and more like a gilded cage. She’d come out for air, to let the chill of the autumn morning scour the remnants of last night’s intensity from her skin.She should have known solitude was a currency the family rarely spent.
“He’s calmer this morning.”
Beth didn’t turn. Sophia Rossi’s voice was like poured cream over crushed glass—smooth, with a deadly edge. She appeared beside Beth, looking not at her but at a particularly thorny, perfect white rose. She wore a dove-gray cashmere set, pearls at her throat.The uniform of a queen in her own court.
“Damien often is,” Beth replied, her tone neutral, “after he gets his way.”
Sophia’s lips thinned.“Is that what happened? Or did you get yours?” She finally turned her green eyes, so like her son’s but without their fire, just their calculation. “The performance in the study was… stirring.But performances are for audiences. We’re alone now, Bethany.”
“Are we?” Beth let a small, cold smile touch her lips. “The hedges have ears, Sophia.The statues have eyes.Nothing is ever alone here.”
“Clever. Always so clever.” Sophia took a delicate step closer.“That’s what I never understood. A clever girl like you, with your own… pursuits. Why you’d work so hard for a place in a family you clearly hold in such contempt.”
The words landed, precise as a scalpel. Beth felt the old wound throb, the one that had scabbed over with years of bitten tongues and forced smiles. She’d promised Damien a performance, but some scripts demanded a different kind of truth.
“Contempt?” Beth laughed, a short, sharp sound that startled a sparrow from a branch.“Is that what you call it? I spent years bending myself into the shape of the daughter-in-law you wanted.I took your veiled insults about my ‘colorful’ family. I smiled through your suggestions that Damien should have married someone from ‘his own world.’ I let you think I was a social climber with good bone structure and not much else.” She turned fully to face the older woman, the crisp air slicing between them. “That’s not contempt, Sophia.That’s endurance.”
Sophia’s composure didn’t crack, but it tightened. “You wanted to be one of us. That required correction.”
“Correction.” Beth tasted the word, found it bitter. “You know, back home, we have a word for people who spend their lives ‘correcting’ others. We call them miserable.” A hint of her Texas past warmed the edges of her vowels, a slow, deliberate thawing of her usual polished clip. “And I never wanted to be one of y’all.Not like that. I wanted a family.A real one.Blended.Messy. Not this… this corporate board of emotional vampires.”
The queen’s mask finally slipped.A flush crept up Sophia’s neck. “How dare you. You came into our home with nothing but a pretty face and a dubious pedigree—”
“Dubious?” Beth’s voice dropped, low and dangerous.“You think my pedigree is dubious? Sweetheart, my family didn’t climb out of the gutter. We were the ones waiting at the bottom with a shovel and a hose.” She took a step forward, forcing Sophia to tilt her chin up to hold her gaze.“We’re fixers.Have been for generations. While your husband’s people were moving olive oil and making threats, mine were moving bodies and making problems disappear. We clean up messes.Familial messes.Financial messes. The kind of messy that leaves a stain.So don’t you ever talk to me about dubious. My blood money is older than yours.”
The garden was utterly silent.Even the wind seemed to still.
Sophia’s breath fogged in the cold air. “You… you lied.”
“I omitted.” Beth’s smile was all teeth.“There’s a difference.I left that life.I wanted out. Then I met your son. And I fell in love with a man who loved his family, who was tangled up in a world that felt, in its own twisted way, like home. So I kneeled.I swallowed every ounce of my God-given pride. I let y’all think the worst of me—that I was low-class, a gold-digger, a pretty little parasite. I knew Damien was keeping secrets, but that’s what you do when you’re young and in love. You endure.”
She could see the memories flashing behind Sophia’s eyes—the charity galas where Beth’s dress was deemed “too bold,” the family dinners where her opinions were met with polite, dismissive silence, the years of being strategically seated away from important guests.
“I spent my whole marriage sucking up to you,” Beth continued, the accent thickening, each word a hammer blow. “Thinking if I was just quiet enough, just helpful enough, just useful enough, you’d finally see me.Not the asset.Not the connection.Me. But you never wanted to see me. You just wanted to see if I’d break.”
“And you didn’t,” Sophia whispered, a strange note of something almost like respect in the shock.
“No, ma’am, I did not.” Beth took a final, deep breath, the fight leaving her in a rush, leaving her cold and clear.“And now? Now you find out I’ve got an inheritance.A legacy of my own. Not just a trust fund, but an empire built on the same dirty foundations as yours.And suddenly, I’m interesting? Suddenly, I’m finally the right kind of daughter for you?” She shook her head, a weary disgust replacing the fury.“It’s pathetic. It really is.”
Sophia stood motionless, the pearls at her throat rising and falling with her quickened breath. The rose garden seemed to hold its breath with her. The carefully constructed narrative of the last decade lay shattered at their feet like frost-killed petals.Finally, Sophia spoke, her voice pared down to its core. “What do you want, Bethany?”
Beth looked past her, towards the black marble bulk of the compound. She thought of Damien inside, of their fragile new understanding, of the dangerous game with Accardi. “I want what I’ve always wanted,” she said, her accent smoothing back into its neutral, polished slate. “Your son. The rest of you…” She let the sentence hang, a verdict in the cold morning air.She didn’t wait for a response. She simply turned and walked back up the slate path, her heels clicking a firm, final rhythm on the stone. She didn’t look back to see if Sophia was watching, but she could feel the weight of that gaze between her shoulder blades—a gaze that was no longer measuring her worth, but perhaps, for the first time, her threat.Inside, the grand foyer was empty. She leaned against the cool marble wall, closing her eyes.Her heart was a wild drum against her ribs. From the west wing, she could hear the low murmur of Damien’s voice, sharp with command, already back to the business of being a king.
And she, having just dethroned a queen, stood alone in the silent hall, wondering what kind of kingdom they could possibly build from the ruins.