"Don't you touch my daughter!" Isabelle's voice rang out across the ballroom, sharp and unmistakably furious, carrying easily to every corner of the now thoroughly silenced room. She scooped Margot up in the same motion, pulling her small, trembling body protectively against her chest, one hand cradling the back of her daughter's head with fierce, instinctive tenderness.
The older woman gasped audibly, one hand still pressed to her chest, her face flushing with a mixture of shock and rapidly building outrage. "How dare you," she managed, her voice climbing toward indignation. "Do you have any idea who I am?"
"I don't particularly care," Isabelle said, her voice dropping now into something colder and more controlled than the sharp fury of moments before. "I care that you grabbed my four-year-old hard enough to make her cry, over what — a spilled drop of something on your dress?"
Nearby, a bystander holding a full champagne flute stood frozen, the glass trembling almost imperceptibly in her hand, apparently too stunned by the sudden violence of the confrontation to remember to move it away from her own gown.
Isabelle held Margot tighter, feeling her daughter's small fists curl into the fabric of her dress, her sobs beginning to quiet now against the familiar safety of her mother's arms. She turned her full attention back to the older woman, whose face had cycled rapidly from outrage into something closer to uncertain alarm.