Go and figure it out.”
Chapter 16 — The Arrests
The federal agents put the handcuffs on Declan for fraud and for the theft from his employees’ pensions.
Seraphina — Roxana — was arrested in the same hour for identity forgery, for fraud, and for the assault on my daughter, which the mansion’s own security cameras had recorded in full, along with the sight of a father standing by and doing nothing.
I asked one thing of my father, and he granted it without question: that the gala go on.
I would not let this become a spectacle with my five-year-old at its center, a clip passed around for strangers to gasp at.
When the press lifted their cameras, my father raised a single hand, and they lowered them again — and for the first time all evening, I watched real power do the only thing that had ever made it worth having.
It protected a child instead of humiliating someone.
I had spent six years on the receiving end of power used the other way — power as a thing that makes other people smaller, that keeps a woman asking for grocery money, that lets a man watch his daughter be hurt and call it a mess.
My father’s world had frightened me my whole life precisely because I’d only ever seen its capacity for that.