Chapter 256: Chapter 258: Harold’s Hunt
VICTORIA’S POV — SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
The notification came while she was doing her hand exercises.
Twenty minutes every night, the physiotherapist had said. Every single night without fail, the same sequence of movements....open, close, flex, rotate designed to maintain what function remained after the surgeries. Three surgeries in eight months. The first two in Sydney, the third with a specialist her mother had found in Melbourne who had looked at Victoria’s hands with the careful neutrality of someone managing expectations and said the words significant improvement in a tone that meant this is as good as it gets.
She did the exercises anyway.
She did them because stopping felt like surrender, and Victoria Ashford had not survived everything that had happened to her by surrendering to anything.
Open. Close. Flex. Rotate.
The right hand was better than the left. The left still sent sharp, specific pain through her middle fingers when she pushed the rotation too far, so she’d learned exactly where the boundary was and worked right up to its edge every night. Not beyond. Not anymore. She’d learned that lesson in the second week of recovery when she’d pushed too hard and spent three days in more pain than she’d thought her body capable of producing.
She’d had a lot of time to think in those three days.
Her phone screen lit up on the bedside table.
She didn’t recognize the number. Australian code but unfamiliar, a prepaid phone, she’d know that pattern anywhere. Her father had used prepaid phones for years when he wanted conversations that didn’t leave records. She’d grown up watching him swap SIM cards the way other people changed shoes.
She answered.
"Victoria." Her father’s voice, lower than she remembered, rougher around the edges. The voice of a man who had been sleeping in motels and eating gas station food and looking over his shoulder for months.
"Dad." She kept her voice even. Her mother was asleep in the next room and she wanted to keep it that way. "Where are you?"
"Safe enough. For now." A pause. The specific pause of a man choosing his words carefully, which meant he wanted something. "How are your hands?"
"Getting better." The automatic answer. The one she gave everyone.
"Victoria."
"They’re getting better," she said, more firmly. "That’s not why you’re calling."
"No," he agreed. "It’s not."
She got up from the bed and moved to the small balcony, sliding the door closed behind her. Sydney at midnight....the harbor lights in the distance, the warm air, the enormous and indifferent sky. She’d hated this city when they’d first arrived. Too bright, too cheerful, too relentlessly pleasant against the backdrop of what she was carrying.
She’d stopped hating it somewhere around month four. Now she just existed in it, which was the best she could manage.
"I need money," Harold said. "Not a lot. Enough to move. Enough to stay ahead of Blackwood’s people for a while longer."
"How much?"
"Fifty thousand. To start."
She leaned against the railing. Looked at the harbor. "To start," she repeated.
"I’m working on something," he said. "A plan. But I need time and I need resources and right now I have neither." A pause. "I know I have no right to ask you. After everything. I know that."
"You don’t," she said. "You really don’t."
He was quiet.
She thought about what after everything actually contained. Her father’s plan to use her as a vehicle for access to Damien Blackwood’s world. The years of being positioned and presented and prepared for a man who had never once looked at her the way he apparently looked at a woman who had broken into his estate wearing a maid’s uniform. The humiliation of watching Damien choose Aria Chen....a nobody, a liar, a criminal with a fake name and a stolen identity....over everything Victoria had been carefully built to represent.
And then what had come after. The rage that had made everything worse. The tweet that she’d told herself was justice and that had been, if she was honest with herself in the way she’d had to become honest with herself in the long empty months of recovery, nothing more than the most expensive tantrum of her life.
The warehouse.
She closed her eyes briefly.
She didn’t let herself think about the warehouse often. When she did it was in fragments....cold, dark, the sound of her own voice, the specific moment she’d understood that Damien Blackwood was not going to stop. The weight of the understanding that she had miscalculated every single thing about what she was dealing with.
And Aria Chen, crouched in front of her in the dark, her hands shaking as she administered first aid with the competence of someone who actually knew what she was doing. Victoria had hated her for that too....for the competence, for the steadiness of it, for the fact that even in a warehouse with zip ties and men with earpieces, Aria Chen had been the most capable person in the room.
She hated her still.
"What’s the plan?" Victoria said.
Harold exhaled.....relief moving through the sound of it. "I need to stay hidden for a while longer. Let things settle. Let Blackwood think it’s over." A pause. "And then I come back. When he’s stopped looking. When his guard is down."
"And then what?"
"And then we finish this."
Victoria turned away from the harbor view. Leaned her back against the railing and looked up at the sky instead.
We.
Such a small word for such a large thing.
"She nearly died," Victoria said. "The poisoning."
"I know."
"You poisoned her in a hospital." She kept her voice neutral. Factual. "With something from Matthew Martinez’s dead father’s pharmaceutical company."
"It would have worked," Harold said, and there was something in his voice that made her stomach turn slightly....not remorse, not even defensiveness. Just the flat assessment of a man analyzing a failed operation. "If she hadn’t woken up. If she hadn’t remembered the formula—"
"She saved herself," Victoria said. "Of course she did." She heard the bitterness in her own voice and didn’t bother containing it. "That’s what she does. She survives everything. Escapes everything. Lands on her feet every single time while the rest of us..." She stopped.
"While the rest of us lose everything," Harold finished quietly.
The words sat between them across twelve thousand miles of phone connection.
There it is, Victoria thought. There’s the thing we have in common.
Her father had lost his company, his reputation, his freedom. She had lost her social world, her hands, her position in the hierarchy she’d been raised to inhabit. They were both living in the wreckage of decisions that Aria Chen and Damien Blackwood had set in motion...or so the story went, in the version Victoria told herself on the worst nights.
