Chapter 2 - The Shattered Glass
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Billy dropped to one knee.
Her right palm came down hard on a jagged shard of crystal. A sharp, burning agony ripped through her flesh. She heard herself draw a sharp, ragged breath, the first sound of pain she had allowed herself to make in nine months.
Standing over her, perfectly illuminated by the six portable lights she had demanded, was Sabine Voss.
Sabine did not blink. She looked down at the bleeding maid, the entire ballroom watching her every move.
"You need to learn what you are," Sabine said loudly, ensuring the cameras captured every syllable.
Three hundred guests stared. No one stood. No one intervened. The wealthy elite of Boston watched the humiliation of a working-class girl with polite, horrified fascination.
Gideon Puit, horrified by the spectacle, finally unfroze. He rushed forward from the shadows, his face pale with panic.
"Ms. Voss, I am so incredibly sorry," Puit stammered, grabbing Billy roughly by the arm to haul her to her feet. "She will be terminated immediately. Please, allow us to replace your—"
The service-corridor doors at the back of the ballroom suddenly groaned open.
The heavy, metallic sound cut through the murmurs of the crowd. Puit stopped mid-sentence.
A man stepped into the ballroom.
He wore a tailored charcoal suit, no tie, and an expression that made the air pressure in the room plummet. He moved with a slow, deliberate grace that belonged to a predator. Two massive men in dark coats walked exactly three paces behind him.
The Windmir addressed him respectfully as "Chairman," the man who owned the holding company that owned the hotel.
But men in Boston’s North End, the men who unloaded the very trucks Billy watched every morning, used another title entirely.
Don Santangelo.
Rafe Santangelo stopped in the middle of the center aisle.
He didn't look at Puit. He didn't look at the three hundred guests.
He looked first at Sabine Voss, the woman he had been planning to marry in less than two months.
May you like
Then, his dark, calculating eyes dropped to Billy, kneeling among the broken glass and spilled wine, blood pooling beneath her hand.
What no one in the room understood, including Rafe, was that Billy Ror hadn't stumbled into this humiliation by accident. She had spent four grueling years trying to place herself inside that exact building, at that exact moment.
