Chapter 18 - The Winter Gala
By December, Chicago glittered with cold lights and expensive lies.
The Rossi winter gala was legendary. Four hundred guests filled the mansion.
Businessmen, politicians who pretended not to know better, old family names, new money, dangerous men with diamond watches, and women who smiled like knives.
Everyone had heard the story. Some version of it, anyway.
Victoria Kensington had suffered a breakdown, they said. She had gone to a private treatment center in Switzerland.
No one mentioned the sealed affidavits. No one mentioned the recordings from her phone. No one mentioned that her father’s company had quietly severed every tie to her name.
And everyone had heard about Beatrice.
The maid. The large woman. The nobody who had somehow become the most trusted person in Leo Rossi’s house.
They expected a spectacle. They expected embarrassment. They expected Leo to hide her.
Instead, at nine o’clock, the ballroom doors opened.
Leo entered in a black tuxedo, Lily on one side in a silver dress, Beatrice on the other in deep emerald velvet.
The gown swept over her body like it had been made not to conceal her, but to honor her. Her shoulders were bare. Her hair was pinned up.
The scar on her cheek had faded to a thin pale line, visible beneath the light like a signature.
Every conversation stopped.
Beatrice felt the old fear rise.
May you like
Then Lily squeezed her hand. “You look like a queen,” the little girl whispered.
Beatrice breathed in. And did not shrink.
