The parents held me down. They mocked me. They spat their contempt like it was currency and they were rich with it. And the bystanders were no better. They spat at me. Actual spit, landing on my clothes, my arms, my face. They hurled insults with the casual ease of people who had never once considered that the woman on the ground beneath them might be someone they should fear.
Luna basked in it. She soaked in their support the way she had soaked in their flattery, and when she was full, when she was swollen with it, she walked toward me and drove her sharp, high heel into my face.
The point of the stiletto pressed into my cheekbone. I felt the skin split. A thin line of heat.
"Hahaha! Regret?" Luna laughed. "I've never regretted anything in my life. I'd love to see how someone like you could make me regret a thing."
The heel pressed harder.
I didn't make a sound.
On the ground, my right hand lay open against the cold stone. And slowly, so slowly that no one noticed, my thumb moved across the face of my mother's signet ring. The heavy gold band with the Valente crest. The ring I had never taken off, not even when I was pretending to be no one. Not even when I was letting a man from a dying rust-belt crew call himself my husband and run my territory into the ground.
I had already decided.
The verdict was sealed.
Luna just didn't know it yet.
None of them did.
Just as Luna's laughter reached its peak, a sound cut through the courtyard. Engines. Not one. Many. The low, controlled growl of heavy vehicles moving in formation, the kind of sound that doesn't belong outside a school.
A line of black armored sedans swept up to the academy gates and stopped in precise sequence, one after another, like a funeral procession that had arrived early.
Doors opened in unison.
Men in dark suits stepped out. One after another after another. They moved with the coordinated silence of soldiers who had done this a thousand times. Broad shoulders, hands at their sides, eyes scanning the courtyard with the flat, professional attention of men who were paid to notice everything and react to nothing until told.
The laughter died.
The courtyard went still.
And every parent who had been holding me down slowly, very slowly, let go.
The sudden commotion caught everyone's attention.
The noisy crowd fell into an eerie silence.