Chapter 91: Open World View
The high-backed chair was stiff and cold, another piece of art meant to be seen, not used. Bethany Montgomery-Rossi—no, just Montgomery now, she reminded herself—sat in it anyway, her spine not touching the leather. Two phones lay on the polished mahogany desk in front of her. One, a sleek black slab, was on speaker. The other, older, scarred with a faint crack across its case, was in her hand.The voice from the speaker was sunshine and gravel. “—and Hank says the new foal is finally nursing proper. Stubborn little thing, just like its aunt.”
Beth’s lips curved, a real smile, one that Vittorio Rossi hadn’t seen in over a decade. It transformed her face, taking the polished socialite edge off and revealing something warmer, earthier. “She comes by it honestly,” Beth replied, her own accent softening, stretching, a Texas cadence bleeding through.“I’ll be there in three days. Have to stop and see Mom first.”
“She’d skin you alive if you didn’t. Tell her I love her.And I refreshed the roses on Daddy’s grave. The yellow ones, like he liked.”
The casualness of it, the domestic duty nestled beside talk of livestock, hit Vittorio like a physical thing. He stood just outside the cracked doorway of the empty study, a ghost in his own home.He’d been looking for her, an apology forming like a stone in his throat. Now, he found himself frozen, intruding.
“Thanks, Dove.” Beth’s voice was thick for a second.She cleared it. “Everything else quiet on the western front?”
A dry chuckle.“Quiet as it ever gets.The Frasier account is settled.Clean. No blowback expected. You handle your end?”
Beth’s eyes flicked to the scarred phone in her hand, her thumb scrolling through a secured feed.“Wrapping it now.Smooth transfer. They won’t even feel the graft until next quarter.” She said it the way another woman might discuss booking a pedicure.“Good.See you soon, Bug. Don’t let those city boys wear you out.”
The call disconnected. The silence in the room was immediate, filled only by the rapid, precise tapping of Beth’s thumbs on the older phone’s screen. She placed it down, picked up the sleek one, and began typing with a different rhythm—sharper, more corporate.Her heels, discarded under the desk, explained the silent entry. Her stockinged feet were pressed firmly into the cold marble floor as she paced a few steps to the window, the neon glow from the city painting her profile in blues and pinks.Vittorio watched. This was the woman his son had described, the force he had failed to comprehend. And yet, staring at her—the elegant line of her neck, the focused furrow between her brows, the way her green eyes scanned financial data only she could see—he still couldn’t connect it.This was not a soldier. This was not some hardened syndicate lieutenant. This was a queen, accustomed to boardrooms and charity galas. The idea of her in the “mud of their world,” as Damien had put it, felt like a cognitive fracture.
She ended a call on the sleek phone, her voice cutting and final.“No, Edward.The offer expires at midnight. Tell him to swim or sink. I don’t care which.” She dropped the phone onto the desk with a quiet clack.“The yellow roses were a nice touch,” Vittorio said, stepping into the doorway.
Beth didn’t jump.She didn’t even turn quickly. She finished typing a last command on the scarred phone, set it down deliberately, and then slowly pivoted to face him. The warmth from her sister’s call was gone, locked away. Her expression was one of polite, neutral inquiry.“Vittorio. I didn’t hear you.”
“I gathered.” He moved fully into the room, his own footsteps echoing. “You’re… multitasking.”
“It’s a necessary skill.” She leaned back against the window frame, crossing her arms. The pose was defensive, but her gaze was utterly open.Challenging him to say something.
He gestured to the phones.“Two worlds.”
“One world,” she corrected softly. “Just different neighborhoods.”
He approached the desk, looked at the folder she had open next to the phones. It wasn’t financial reports.It was schematic diagrams, security grids, a logistical map of the Port Newark-Elizabeth complex. He didn’t touch it. “Damien spoke with us.”
“I know.”
“He said you took him to Texas. Showed him… everything.”
She watched him, her head tilted slightly.“I did.”
Vittorio finally met her eyes, truly met them. He was looking for the ghost of the twenty-two-year-old girl she’d been, wide-eyed at his dinner table, flinching at the sound of raised voices in Italian. He saw only the woman who had built an empire from her divorce settlement, who had just calmly discussed “grafts” and “settled accounts.” The echo was there, in the shape of her face, but the substance was entirely foreign.“It’s difficult,” he admitted, the words ash in his mouth. “To reconcile.”
A single, sharp smile.“For you?I can only imagine. For me, it was just Tuesday.” She pushed off from the window and walked to the desk, closing the folder with a definitive slap.“Did you need something? I have a call with Singapore in seven minutes.”
The dismissal was absolute, effortless. He was the patriarch in his own compound, and she was dismissing him. The sheer, breathtaking audacity of it, the implicit power, finally made a crack in his disbelief.This wasn’t just confidence.It was territorialism.
“I came to apologize,” he said, forcing the words out. “For the way we… for the isolation.”
Beth picked up her heels, sliding them on without looking at him.The act of armoring herself. “Thank you.” The words were empty, a social nicety. She gathered her phones, the folder tucked under her arm.
“It’s not just because of what we learned about your father,” he pressed, hearing the desperation in his own voice, hating it.
She stopped, her hand on the doorframe, and turned. Her green eyes, so like Damien’s but infinitely colder in that moment, held him.“I know why you’re apologizing, Vittorio. And I know Damien told you to mean it. So let me be clear: your son is getting a second chance because I choose to give him one.You… you are getting tolerance. Because he asked me for it.That’s the new neighborhood you’re in. Don’t get lost.”
She left, the click of her heels fading down the hall, leaving him alone in the empty, cold room with the scent of her perfume—jasmine and something sharper, like gunmetal—hanging in the air. He looked at the spot where she’d stood, at the ghost of her reflection in the dark window, and for the first time, he understood. He wasn’t looking at a polished socialite playing a dangerous game.He was looking at the game itself. And it was already being played, on a board he had only just learned existed. The fear that crept up his spine then was clean, and sharp, and entirely new.