Chapter 10 - The Color of Sunlight
One year later.
The ballroom smelled of fresh lilies, polished brass, and vintage champagne.
It was eight o’clock on a cool, crisp Saturday in October, and the grand hall had once again been thrown open to three hundred of the most powerful people in the country. Senators, federal judges, shipping magnates, and the heads of the five remaining syndicate families from New York, Detroit, and New Orleans stood beneath the towering Bohemian crystal chandeliers.
Yet, the atmosphere in the room was entirely different from the night Camille Whitmore had stood on the marble floor.
There was no arrogance here. There was no cruel, brittle laughter echoing off the plaster moldings.
When the string quartet played, they played with a rich, soaring majesty that filled the grand space with warmth. The waiters moved with quiet pride, dressed in crisp black waistcoats, treated with absolute dignity and paid wages that allowed their families to live in dignity.
I stood at the top of the grand bifurcated staircase, looking down at the crowd.
I wore an off-the-shoulder gown of emerald-green velvet, hand-embroidered with thousands of tiny gold threads along the corseted bodice. Around my neck, resting against my skin with a familiar, cool weight, was the Whitmore Star—not worn as a trophy of war, but as a symbol of the house I now ruled.
On my left hand, a simple, unadorned gold band rested beneath a flawless eight-carat emerald—a ring that had never belonged to anyone else, forged specifically for the woman who carried the Castalano name.
A warm, heavy hand rested against the small of my back.
I turned my head.
Dominic stood beside me, immaculate in a black bespoke tuxedo, his dark hair slicked back, the scar through his eyebrow giving his handsome, aristocratic face an edge of dangerous authority that made every man in the room below lower their gaze when he looked their way.
He looked down at me, his hazel eyes softening with that private, boundless adoration that he reserved only for the rooms behind our private doors.
“Are you ready, Mrs. Castalano?” he murmured, his lips brushing the crown of my head.
“I am always ready when I am with you,” I replied, slipping my hand into his. His fingers closed around mine, strong, warm, and unbreakable.
Before we could take our first step down the grand stairs, a small sound behind us made us pause.
“Mama? Dominic?”
We both turned.
Lucia stood at the entrance of the private gallery.
She was eight years old now, taller, her dark hair falling in soft, lustrous waves over her shoulders, her brown eyes bright with health, intelligence, and joy. She had spent the morning winning the third-grade mathematics ribbon at Sacred Heart, and she had spent the afternoon riding her new chestnut pony across the estate’s south paddocks.
She was wearing a brand-new dress.
It was cut from the finest Italian silk, dyed the color of a midsummer morning—the exact, radiant shade of pure yellow sunlight. The hem was bordered with delicate French lace, and the sleeves were tailored with surgical perfection by the finest dressmakers on Michigan Avenue.
Yet, stitched into the inner hem of the skirt, hidden against the silk where only she and I would ever know it existed, was a single, three-inch square of coarse, faded cotton from an old clearance bin on Roosevelt Road.
She had asked for it herself.
*“So we never forget how we got here, Mama,”* she had told me that morning.
Lucia smoothed the silk skirt with both hands, looking up at us with a shy, radiant smile.
“Do I look pretty?” she asked.
Dominic released my hand.
He walked across the parquet floor, knelt down on both knees in front of my daughter, completely indifferent to his tailored trousers, and reached out to gently adjust the yellow silk ribbon in her hair.
He looked into her face with the profound, unyielding pride of a father who had found his purpose in the life of a child he had chosen to claim as his own blood.
“Lucia,” Dominic said, his deep, rumbling voice filling the corridor with absolute certainty. “You are the brightest light in this entire city. You look like the sun coming up over the ocean.”
Lucia giggled, throwing her small arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. Dominic closed his eyes, holding her against his broad chest for a long, tender moment, before standing up and offering her his left arm.
“Will you accompany us down the stairs, Miss Castalano?” he asked with exaggerated formality.
“Only if I can sit on the third step for five minutes first,” she teased, her eyes dancing with mischief.
Dominic laughed—a rich, joyous sound that echoed down the long gallery—and shook his head.
“No, little one,” Dominic said, taking my hand in his right and holding Lucia’s hand in his left. “In this house, you never have to sit on the stairs again. You walk through the front door.”
Together, the three of us stepped to the edge of the grand staircase.
May you like
Below us, the string quartet ceased playing. The three hundred guests in the ballroom went entirely silent, turning their faces upward toward the light.
Dominic Castalano led his family down the marble steps into the grand hall, his head held high, his grip tight around my fingers, while my daughter walked beside us, her silk skirt glowing like pure sunlight in a room that would never know darkness again.
