"Remember your place." His voice was granite wrapped in velvet. "You are not a daughter of this Family. You are an accident we chose to shelter out of misplaced sentiment. Either remain with gratitude and silence, or remove yourself from our sight permanently."
When those words reached me, I felt nothing.
Some wounds, when they have been opened too many times, simply stop bleeding.
"You have always had your preference," I said, and I was surprised to hear something almost like dark amusement in my own voice. "And that preference was never me."
Don Ettore's expression hardened into something dangerous.
"Return to your fiancé," he commanded, his tone brooking no argument. "And remember what you owe this Family."
I lowered my lashes in a gesture of submission.
"Understood."
But I knew, with a certainty that settled into my bones like winter frost, that this would be the last time I bent my head to their authority.
The first thing I noticed was the suffocating weight of silence in the private dining hall.