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She sucked in her breath. “So why did you support me?”
“The alternative was to let them think we were already having problems in our marriage. I had to act proud of you!”
“Act?” She turned pale. “You mean you’re not?”
Stefano ground his teeth. “You’re talented, Tess. No one can dispute that. Your dress—” his eyes traced over her curves “—is spectacular.”
Her eyes lit up. “Then—”
“But you can’t seriously want to launch your own company. Do you want to work eighty-hour weeks in a studio, leaving Esme with a nanny? Do you know what it’s like for a child to be raised that way? Because I do.”
Her jaw tightened. “Have you forgotten I’ve spent most of Esme’s life working flat out at my uncle’s bakery?”
“No. I haven’t,” he said grimly. “Nor have I forgotten the reason. Because I abandoned you without financial support.” Just thinking of how he’d left Tess and Esme destitute still made his stomach clench. “As long as you are my wife, you will have a comfortable life.”
“What if I don’t want to take it easy?” she retorted. “What if I want to follow my dreams?”
“What dreams? Being ‘an assistant to an assistant,’ as you charmingly put it, working endless days fetching coffee, doing very little design, for almost no pay?” he said scorchingly. “That’s your big dream, instead of caring for our daughter?”
Tess’s expression fell as they walked through the crowded foyer of the palais. “If I could find a way to do both...”
“Tonight the story was supposed to be Mercurio,” he ground out. “Instead, now it will be you.”
She looked abashed. With quiet defiance, she lifted her chin. “I couldn’t wear those dresses, Stefano. They were horrible. No woman alive would want to wear them.”
Her simple, obvious statement made
his heart stop.
Tess was right.
Stefano couldn’t imagine Caspar von Schreck’s beige, peculiar dresses on any woman of his acquaintance. What did that mean?
It meant that the new collection would fail.
It meant the stock price would fall.
It meant Zacco was lost for good.
As they entered the enormous ballroom in the palace, where Mercurio’s runway show would be held, Stefano forced himself to greet people, to act confident, as if he didn’t already know the battle was lost. As he spoke to acquaintances, he gripped his wife’s hand. He was relieved when the lights started to flicker, an indication that the show was about to begin.
They found their seats. For this one show, he’d wanted to sit in the front row. He looked around them at the cavernous space. Were those smoke machines?
Foreboding went through him.
A moment after they sat down, all the lights abruptly went off, turning the ballroom completely black.
For a moment, the hundreds of guests inside the palais were silent. He smelled smoke. Then dramatic electronic music began to thunder around them. A strobe light, high overhead, began to flash outrageous patterns against the smoke.
Pain rose to Stefano’s temples, throbbing in time to the loud music and pulsing lights.
The first model started down the catwalk, wearing a dress just like the ones von Schreck had sent them earlier. It did not look any better on the model than it had on the hanger. The dress’s cutouts highlighted strange parts of the model’s body—her lower belly, beneath her armpit and half her breast—making her look awkward and peculiar. The sickening beige color made the girl’s face look so washed-out she almost looked dead.
It’s a disaster, Stefano thought wildly. But at least he’d been prepared. At least things couldn’t get worse.
Then they got worse.
Avant-garde was how the most charitable magazines described the Mercurio show later. More typical words to describe it were epic fail and instant internet meme.
