“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.
The electronic music and flashing lights that added such drama to the darkness abruptly faded with a loud scratching squeal. The Hokey Pokey played on the loudspeakers, the old children’s song sounding somehow threatening rather than playful. The first model disappeared, and new models started rapidly coming down the catwalk one by one, wearing large, cartoonish animal masks that completely covered their heads, as if to distract the audience from all the lumpy beige and greige dresses.
A hush fell across the crowd, then tittering laughter. Camera phones came up.
And that was even before a model wearing a lion mask, who probably couldn’t see well through the huge fuzzy mane, tripped on her high heels and fell off the catwalk, landing on the lap of a senior editor of Vogue Italia. The other models kept walking as if nothing had happened.
Stefano felt his wife’s gentle hand on his arm. She was watching him with worried eyes. He realized his hands had tightened into fists.
The show seemed to last forever. When it was finally over, Caspar von Schreck, the young, trendy designer whom everyone on the Gioreale board of directors had pleaded for Stefano to hire, came out wearing a full lumberjack beard, baggy tweed trousers and an open shirt. Holding his little dog against his chest, he waved at the crowd and bowed as if he had done something amazing.
He had, Stefano realized. With one stroke, he’d just caused Stefano to lose his chance at buying back the company that had been in his family for generations.
No. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t von Schreck’s fault. It was Stefano’s. He should have insisted on seeing the designs in advance. He should have known that just because the designer was talented, it didn’t also mean that he wasn’t crazy drunk on his own vanity.
“Oh, my God,” a socialite breathed behind them, turning to speak into her camera for social media. “Did you all see that? My Halloween costume is sorted!”
Stefano rose abruptly to his feet, his jaw tight, and headed backstage.
He already knew that the stock price would plummet tomorrow. Even though Stefano was Gioreale’s CEO and primary shareholder, he’d still have to explain this disgrace to other shareholders and the media, and explain how, under his leadership, Mercurio had gone from stock loser to international laughingstock.
“Stefano—”
Behind him, Tess’s voice was pleading, but he didn’t stop for her. He couldn’t.
There was only one person he wanted to talk to right now. And it would be all he could do not to talk with his fists.
* * *
Tess felt sick to her stomach as she followed Stefano backstage. This was the Mercurio fashion show?
Where was the fashion?
All she’d seen was a bunch of starved-looking girls, many of them younger than her cousins, walking in clothes that looked like ripped-up grocery bags, stumbling down the catwalk in ridiculous animal helmets. It might be called performance art; to Tess it was just silly.
This was the show her husband had so badly wanted to be perfect. She glanced at Stefano’s tight shoulders in his tailored black jacket as he strode ahead of her through the crowd. Although she felt badly for him, something told her that her sympathy would be unwelcome.
Backstage was a madhouse of stylists and models with racks of clothes and people everywhere.
An American reporter, the cohost of an influential morning talk show, stepped into his path, hovering with a live camera crew.
“Your Highness! Prince Stefano! May I get a comment? What did you think of Mercurio’s spring collection?”
“We are, of course, very proud,” Stefano ground out, “to have such a daring, avant-garde artist as our creative director. His vision is world changing.”
Tess could see from her husband’s taut jaw how he really felt about it, no matter the PR spin he was trying to put on it. Then she heard wild yelling and barking.
Turning, she saw Caspar von Schreck loudly berating a young woman. His little dog was barking, adding to the noise. The shamed girl stood in tears, holding the lion mask in her arms.
Tess recognized Kebe, the beautiful model Stefano had once given a ride home in New York. She was the model who’d tripped on stage, Tess realized. She barely looked older than her nineteen-year-old cousin Natalie.
“You idiot,” Caspar von Schreck was screaming into her face, flecks of spittle flying. “You clumsy clod!”
“Please, Mr. von Schreck,” the girl whispered. Her shoulders slumped. “It was an accident...”