"How dare I?" Isabelle repeated, her voice dropping further still, low enough now that only the woman directly in front of her, and the handful of guests standing nearest, could hear the full weight of what she said next. "You don't get to touch her. Not her arm, not her hand, not a single hair on her head. Do you understand me?"
The older woman's composure cracked fully now, her earlier indignation collapsing into something closer to genuine unease as she registered, perhaps for the first time, the full intensity of the woman standing in front of her — not simply an overprotective mother overreacting to a minor scolding, but someone whose fury carried the particular controlled precision of a person entirely capable of following through on whatever came next.
"I was simply correcting her manners," the woman said, though her voice had lost most of its earlier confidence. "There's no need for this kind of hostility—"
"There's every need," Isabelle said, shifting Margot slightly against her hip, freeing one hand to reach out and grip the older woman's face firmly between her fingers, tilting it upward so their eyes met directly, unavoidably.
The ballroom around them had gone utterly silent, three hundred guests suspended in stunned observation of a confrontation none of them had anticipated interrupting their evening of champagne and charitable small talk.