The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 812

Patricia laughed again, and this time it went all the way round the ballroom.

"Kneel? To you?" She stood up from the front row, one cheek still red from the rain. "I made that perfume. Everybody on this coast knows it. I'm not kneeling to anybody."

"You didn't make it," Serena said. "You stole it. From my mother's notebook. So kneel."

"I won't."

"Then don't."

Serena picked up the folders from the podium. All of them. She held them up so the whole room could see.

"These are the House of Tiffany's loans. Every one. They're mine now. Tomorrow I sell them. To anyone on this coast who wants to watch the Tiffanys go under. And I think there will be a long line."

The room went dead still.

Pauline was on her feet. "You wouldn't dare."

"Wouldn't I?" Serena looked down at the front row. At her aunt. At her cousin. At the Baroness beside the podium. "I know exactly what happened, Aunt Pauline. Patricia didn't do it alone. The whole house knew. My mother's notebooks went missing, and nobody looked for them. Patricia wore my mother's winter to every party for two years, and nobody asked where it came from. You all agreed. So she could stand up there tonight as the head of the house."

Her voice did not shake.

"That was the house's mistake. The whole house. So the whole house can pay for it."

"Serena." The Baroness's voice was very low. "Think about what you're saying."

"I have, Grandmother. For two years. In the dark."

The old woman looked at the folders in her granddaughter's hands. Three hundred years of the House of Tiffany, in a stack of paper. One girl could sell it in the morning, and nothing would be left by night.

She turned to the front row.

"Patricia. Come here."

Patricia didn't move. "Grandmother—"

"Come here!"

The Baroness's voice cracked across the ballroom like a whip. Patricia came out of the front row slowly, as if her shoes were full of sand, and stopped in front of the podium. In front of everyone.

"Kneel," the Baroness said.

"Grandmother, you can't! Everybody's watching!"

"That's why. Kneel."

"It's not fair! Everyone wanted me to have it! Mother said—"

"Patricia!" Pauline hissed. "Shut up!"

"Do you want this house on the street tomorrow?" The Baroness took Patricia by the arm, hard, her old fingers digging into the silk. "Because of your pride? Because you couldn't make your own perfume? Kneel, girl. Now."

She pushed down.

Patricia's knees hit the polished floor in front of the podium with a small, hard sound.

At every table, phones came up.

Patricia knelt there in her silk and pearls, with the whole coast watching, and looked up at Serena. Something in her face asked please. She had never said please in that house, and she couldn't find the word now.

"Say it," the Baroness ordered.

"I was wrong," Patricia said, to the floor.

"Louder," Serena said.

"I was wrong!"

"Who made it?"

Patricia's shoulders shook. She lifted her head, and her eyes were full of tears and murder at the same time.

"Aunt Rosalind made it." Loud enough for the doors. "The winter is hers. I took it out of her notebook, and I put my name on it."

The words fell into the silence and stayed there.

The fault was not in their stars. It was in themselves, every one of them at that front table, and now the whole coast had seen it.

At the Tiffany table, a quiet man in a grey suit had been looking at his own hands all night.

Gideon Tiffany lifted his eyes. He looked at his daughter at the podium, the way he used to look at her mother across a bench full of bottles.

He didn't look away.

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