Page 52 of Broken Crown

CHAPTER 15

SABRINA

Security flooded in, voices rising as they closed in on Filomena and forced Fabrizio toward the exit.

Sebastian shifted.

His focus slipped—just long enough.

And in that split second, his grip loosened.

Not completely.

Not intentionally.

But enough.

A hand closed around my wrist and pulled me sideways.

The rings gave it away before I even turned.

Arabella.

She tugged me through a side door and into a narrow service corridor, the noise of the dining room muffled the instant the heavy wood swung shut behind us. The sudden quiet was almost worse. My ears rang with the ghosts of shouting.

"Breathe," she said.

I braced my hand against the wall. The plaster was rough beneath my palm.

"Your father just⁠—"

"I know." She said it the way someone would say, It's raining.

She leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed, ankles crossed, as composed as if she'd stepped out of a dinner party and not a war zone. The only tell was a faint tremor in the diamond pendant at her throat.

"Are you okay?" I managed.

She tilted her head. "You're sweet for asking. Most people forget I'm in the room when the battle royales start."

"That happens often?"

"Define often."

I stared at her.

She held my gaze for a beat, then looked away. "Christmas two years ago, our father threw a bottle of Barolo at Rafaello's head. Missed. Hit a Caravaggio. Sebastian had to buy the silence of three art restorers and a sommelier." She smoothed a crease in her dress. "The sommelier was the expensive one."

I couldn't tell if she was joking. Her delivery was so dry it could have gone either way. But the fact that she had the anecdote ready—polished, rehearsed, timed for a laugh—told me everything.

This wasn't a crisis for her. It was a pattern.

"Arabella…does it ever stop?"

She looked at me then. Really looked. Not the breezy once-over she'd given me in the courtyard or the performative warmth she'd deployed against her mother.

"No," she said quietly. "It doesn't stop. It just changes shape." She reached over and adjusted the collar of my dress where it had twisted during the chaos, the gesture automatic and sisterly. "But you get better at knowing where to stand so the glasses don't hit you."

She wasn't warning me. She wasn't even complaining. She was offering me a survival guide.