Chapter 1 - The Handbag They Were Willing to Fight For
Lucian’s fist crossed the distance between them before Margaret had fully caught her balance.
“Your mother is confused.”
He said it almost calmly, as if that explained why a sixty-eight-year-old woman had just been shoved away from her own handbag in the reception room of the Bellamy family mansion.
Dominic saw the punch coming.
He shifted outside it, Lucian’s knuckles passing his cheek by inches, and drove one hard counterpunch across his cousin’s jaw.
Lucian’s body twisted backward.
He hit the tall wine display with enough force to split the wooden frame.
Presentation boxes dropped first. Then bottle holders folded under his weight, sending polished accessories and empty display pieces across the Persian rug. Lucian vanished halfway beneath the wreckage with one shoulder pinned against a broken shelf.
Dominic didn’t follow him.
He turned immediately toward his mother.
Margaret stood near a carved side table, one hand pressed against it for balance. Her navy dress had twisted at the waist. One pearl earring hung slightly lower than the other.
Her leather handbag lay near her feet.
Valeria saw Dominic looking at it.
Something changed in her face.
She lunged.
Not toward Margaret.
Toward the bag.
Dominic caught her wrist before her fingers reached the handle.
Valeria jerked against him with surprising force.
“Let go.”
Dominic pulled her away from his mother and struck her once across the face with his open hand.
The blow spun her directly into the champagne cart.
The cart overturned with a metallic crash. Empty glasses, silver trays, and folded white napkins slid across the rug as Valeria went down beside it.
Dominic moved between her and Margaret.
Only then did he bend and retrieve the handbag.
Margaret didn’t ask for it back.
That was the first thing that bothered him.
His mother had carried that same dark leather bag for almost twelve years. She never let anyone dig through it. She had once made Dominic drive twenty miles back to a restaurant because she had left it hanging on a chair.
Now she watched him open it without saying a word.
Dominic looked inside.
A thick cream-colored packet sat beneath her wallet.
He recognized the letterhead immediately.
Bellamy Estate Holdings.
His expression changed.
He pulled the top page halfway free.
There was his mother’s name.
A property description.
A lender.
And a dollar figure large enough that he checked it twice.
Dominic looked toward the wreckage.
“You shoved my mother because she brought me this?”
Lucian didn’t answer.
He looked at Valeria.
Valeria looked back at him.
It lasted perhaps a second.
It was enough.
Dominic had spent the last five years assuming Lucian and Valeria disliked his mother because Margaret questioned every renovation, every expense, every proposed change to the old family estate.
This wasn’t irritation.
It was fear.
Margaret was watching both of them now.
Lucian had stopped trying to stand.
Valeria had stopped touching her cheek.
Neither was looking at Margaret anymore.
They were looking at the paper in Dominic’s hand.
May you like
And Dominic understood one thing before he understood anything else.
Whatever his mother had brought into that room, both of them had known exactly what it was.
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