Chapter 178 *
Scarlett’s POV
The footage was grainy but clear enough. A parking garage. Underground, by the look of it. The timestamp in the corner read three weeks ago.
A man and a woman walked into frame together. His hand was on the small of her back. She leaned into him the way people only do when they've been doing it for years. They stopped near the elevator bank, and he turned toward her and kissed her. Not a quick kiss. The kind that assumed privacy.
I recognized Miranda before anyone else in the room had time to process what they were looking at.
So that's what this is.
I sat back in my chair. The room stayed completely silent for about four seconds.
Then Viviana made a sound.
It started low, somewhere in her chest, and it built into something I don't have a clean word for. She shoved her chair back and grabbed the coffee cup in front of her and threw it directly at Salvatore.
It shattered on the table two inches from his arm. Coffee sprayed across his jacket and across the papers in front of the man sitting next to him.
"Miranda Kestrel." Her voice was shaking so badly the words came out jagged. "My college roommate. My best friend for thirty years. I treated her like family—"
Nico and Graham moved at the same time. They each grabbed one of her arms and pulled her back, and she fought them, her whole body rigid.
"Don't." Graham had his arm around her shoulders. "Mom. Don't."
Salvatore's face had gone the color of old concrete. "Renzo." His voice dropped to something just above a whisper. "Shut it down. Right now. This is a family matter—"
Lorenzo didn't even glance at him.
He waited until Viviana's voice had broken down from words into something wordless, and then he waited a little longer. Then he looked at the room and said, simply, "We're just getting started," and clicked to the next file.
"Sal and Miranda have been together for a long time," Lorenzo said. "They have two kids. A son currently studying abroad."
He paused.
"And a daughter."
His eyes moved to Zelda.
The new footage opened on a private dining room at some restaurant I didn't recognize. The kind of place where booths have curtains. Salvatore sat at a table with Miranda and Zelda, and there was a birthday cake on the table with lit candles. The three of them were laughing. Zelda leaned over and put her arm around Miranda's neck, and Miranda pressed her cheek to Zelda's hair, and the resemblance between their profiles was so obvious.
I watched Zelda's face go white. Her hands pressed flat against the table.
"That's not real." Her voice quavered. "That video's been manipulated. AI-generated. You can do anything with technology now—"
The tears came next. She pushed her chair back and stood up, and her legs looked unsteady, and she pressed one hand to her mouth like she was trying to hold something in. A sound escaped anyway. Small and broken. The kind that makes people instinctively want to reach out.
"Mom." Her voice cracked on the word. "Mom, look at me."
Viviana was still standing between her sons, her face colorless.
"Please." Zelda took one step toward her, then stopped, like she was afraid of being rejected. Her chin was trembling. "I know what that looks like. I know what you're thinking right now. But I swear to you—"
"Zelda—" Nico started.
"Let me finish." She wasn't looking at Nico. She was only looking at Viviana. Tears were running down her face now, and she made no move to wipe them. "You are the only mother I have ever known. The only one I have ever wanted. Whatever that video is supposed to prove, it doesn't change what we are to each other. It doesn't change nineteen years."
She took another step forward. Her voice dropped to something that barely carried past the two of them.
"I need you to believe me. I need you to choose me. Please."
The room had gone completely still.
I watched Viviana's face the way you watch ice when you're not sure if it's going to hold.
Something moved behind her eyes. The part of her that had spent nineteen years building a version of her family she could live inside.
She crossed the room and pulled Zelda into her arms.
Zelda grabbed hold of her and buried her face in her shoulder, and her shoulders shook, and every person in the room who didn't know better would have sworn they were watching a daughter fall apart in her mother's arms.
I knew better.
She's still going, I thought. Even now, with everyone watching, she's still running the same play.
Viviana pressed her cheek to the top of Zelda's head and looked up at the room. Her eyes swept across the board members and the capos and landed on me, and her finger came up.
"It's fake." Her voice had steadied into something cold and certain. "This whole thing is fake. Someone is trying to tear my family apart."
Her finger didn't move.
"You did this. You fabricated these videos. You've been trying to destroy this family since the day you walked back in—"
I looked at her for a moment.
"Sure," I said. "If that's what you want to believe."
On the recording, Zelda and Miranda were laughing at something Salvatore had just said, their faces tipped toward each other, mirror images in the candlelight.
Viviana was still holding Zelda, her arms tight around her, her eyes closed like she could shut out the screen and everything on it by simply refusing to look.
That was the thing about Viviana Romano that I'd never quite been able to wrap my head around. She wasn't stupid. She had run the family's finances for decades. She knew, somewhere underneath all of it, exactly what she had just seen.
And she had looked at the truth and decided it was too expensive.
Because if the videos were real, then Zelda wasn't hers. And if Zelda wasn't hers, then the last nineteen years were built on a lie that her husband and her best friend had constructed together, specifically to use her. And if that was true, then what did she have left? What did any of it mean?
So she chose not to believe it.
It wasn't loyalty. It wasn't even love, not really. It was fear dressed up as both. She was holding onto Zelda the way a person holds onto the wreckage after a ship goes down, not because the wreckage is worth saving, but because letting go means admitting there's nothing left to hold.
I found that I didn't feel angry about it.
I just felt tired on her behalf.
Damon's hand covered mine on the table. It was unhurried and quiet, the way he did most things. He didn't look at me.
I turned my hand over and held his.
"This meeting is over." Salvatore finally stood up. His voice came out low. "Everyone out. Now."
"Whatever you think you just saw, it gets handled inside this family. Behind closed doors. The way it's always —."
"The doors are locked," Lorenzo interrupted. "Nobody leaves until this is done."