Blood Right The Valente Betrayal

The Valente name. My mother's name. My name. Falling from this woman's painted mouth like loose change.

The other parents pressed closer, feeding on her certainty.

"If you hadn't been a mistress, Luna wouldn't have hit you. You brought this on yourself."

"You're just a filthy side piece. Instead of keeping your head down, you're out here provoking people. Getting slapped is the least of what you deserve."

"Yeah, you've got a taste for being a tramp, huh? Who are you pretending to be the innocent victim for? We're not like those men blinded by lust."

Even the bystanders joined in. Each insult landed sharper than the last, and each one emboldened Luna further. I could see it in her shoulders, the way she straightened, the way she fed on their approval like oxygen. She was performing. She had always been performing.

Her gaze locked onto my car behind me, the armored sedan with its tinted windows and reinforced chassis. Her eyes blazed.

"You filthy woman, spending my husband's money like it's nothing! How dare you drive a car like that? A cheap mistress like you doesn't deserve it!"

She stepped closer, her heels clicking against the courtyard stone.

"I hate mistresses more than anything. Every mistress on earth should die!"

She pulled a key from her purse and dragged it across the sedan's door panel with both hands, gouging deep lines into the paint. The sound was high and thin, metal screaming against metal. She carved the words large enough for anyone passing on the street to read.

Mistresses must die.

I looked at the letters. Looked at her.

"You'll soon realize how ironic those words are," I said.

Something shifted behind Luna's eyes. Not fear. Not yet. But the faintest flicker of something she couldn't name.

It passed. Rage swallowed it whole.

"You filthy woman! Living off my husband's money and acting all high and mighty!" Her voice cracked with the force of it. "Today, I'll make sure you pay back every penny you've taken from him!"

She picked up a brick from the edge of the landscaped walkway and swung it into the windshield. The glass held for a fraction of a second, then spider-webbed and caved. She hit it again. And again. The windows. The headlights. The hood. Each blow accompanied by a grunt of exertion that she seemed to mistake for power.

The other parents watched for perhaps three seconds. Then they were energized, grabbing whatever they could find. A loose paving stone. A metal thermos. A child's scooter abandoned by the gate. They swarmed the sedan like locusts, smashing with an enthusiasm that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the permission Luna had given them to destroy something beautiful.

After the windows were gone, two of them climbed inside and began slashing the leather seats with keys and nail files, tearing apart the interior panel by panel. The reinforced frame held, but everything inside it was gutted. The once-pristine vehicle was reduced to a carcass in minutes.

Then one of the women pried open the trunk and gasped.

"Look! There's expensive stuff hidden in here!"

Luna approached, reaching inside with the casual entitlement of a woman who believed everything in this world was already hers. She pulled out a painting in a protective sleeve and sneered.

"A woman who makes her living on her back is collecting art?" She held it up for the crowd. "Trying to act cultured?"

She flicked her hair behind her right ear again. The same motion. The same rehearsed cruelty.

"It's an insult for trash like you to own something like this. Someone like you only deserves trash."

She tore the painting in half. The sound of the canvas ripping cut through the courtyard noise like a blade. She threw the pieces to the ground and ground them under her heel, twisting slowly, making sure I watched.

One of the bystanders, a man in a dark overcoat who'd been lingering near the back of the crowd, leaned in for a closer look at the shredded remains. His face went pale.

"This looks like an authentic James. I heard it starts at three hundred million at auction."

A murmur rippled through the crowd. Luna didn't flinch. She lifted her chin higher.

"So what if it's worth three hundred million? It's all my husband's money anyway." She smiled, and the smile was ugly with triumph. "My husband's money is my money. If I want to destroy my own things, what's the problem?"

Her words left me speechless with anger.

Let's not even mention that Davide was a penniless nobody from a dying crew in a rust-belt town when I married him. A man with nothing to his name but charm and ambition. Even when I entrusted him with oversight of our territory and its operations, he nearly bled the Syndicate dry through incompetence and skimming.