Victor saw only a challenge. The store was quiet enough now that several people had stopped pretending they were not listening, and he could feel the invisible pressure of an audience watching his authority being questioned. He reached for the card, not because he intended to process it, but because he wanted to demonstrate that the older man could not make him retreat. Emma saw the change in his expression and felt a cold uncertainty settle into her stomach.
"Sir," Victor said, "we have standards here." He opened the drawer beneath the register, removed a pair of heavy-handled scissors normally used for packaging materials, and held the card above the counter. David's brow furrowed. "What are you doing?" he asked.
"Putting an end to this," Victor replied. And then, before Emma could reach him, he closed the scissors around the card.
"Wait, that's the customer's property!" Emma cried.
The card snapped unevenly. Victor made a second cut, as though the first were not enough, and pushed the pieces across the glass toward David. "Now take your fake card and get out," he said. His voice rang through the showroom, and the music that had seemed so gentle a few minutes earlier suddenly felt grotesquely out of place.
For a moment David could not quite connect the action to the man who had performed it. He had watched business partners lose their tempers, seen contractors damage equipment, and stood through meetings in which people made decisions that cost millions of dollars. But he had never seen a store manager deliberately destroy a customer's payment card simply because he disliked the appearance of the customer holding it. He looked at the little pieces and felt, beneath his disbelief, a deep and almost weary disappointment.
"You cut up my card," he said. It was not an accusation so much as an effort to establish that everyone had witnessed the same thing. Victor straightened his tie, apparently pleased that the confrontation had ended on terms he could understand. "It wasn't valid," he replied. "You were trying to waste our time."
"You didn't run it," David answered. "You didn't call the bank. You didn't examine it long enough to read who issued it." He paused, looked toward the tray where the necklace lay, and added, "I came to buy something for my wife. That's all I came here to do."
Victor folded his arms. "And I'm telling you that this establishment is not here to entertain fantasies." He glanced at the security guard outside the doorway, then back at Emma. "Don't stand there looking horrified. Clear the counter. We have actual customers waiting."
Emma could feel her heart beating in her throat. She had seen Victor dismiss people, sometimes so smoothly the targets did not seem to understand what had happened until they were back on the sidewalk. She had seen him pretend to lose reservations for private appointments, quote higher prices than the tags in a case, and claim merchandise was unavailable while it sat plainly beneath the glass. But watching him take scissors to a customer's card crossed a line that even her cautious imagination had never prepared her for.