Chapter 257: Chapter 259: What is he planning?
She was self-aware enough, now, to know it wasn’t the whole story. The long months of recovery and relative isolation had stripped some things away that she hadn’t been able to see before.
But self-awareness did not dissolve the anger. It just gave it sharper edges.
"If I send you this money," she said carefully, "I need to know it’s not going toward anything that will bring Blackwood’s people directly to us. To me and mother. If you do something that leads them here..."
"I won’t."
"That’s not a promise, that’s a sentence." She kept her voice steady. "I need to know, Dad. We’ve been careful. Mother gave up everything to come here to be with me and we’ve been living carefully and quietly and I am not going to let your next plan blow that up."
A pause. "I’ll be careful."
"You said that last time."
"Victoria." His voice changed. Something underneath it that was, despite everything, her father. The man who had taught her to ride a bicycle and attended every school recital and told her she was worth more than anyone in any room she ever walked into. The man who had also spent twenty years using her as a chess piece without fully understanding that was what he was doing. "I know I’ve made mistakes. I know what I put you through. I know—" He stopped. "I just need a little more time. A little more space. And then I’ll make this right."
"You can’t make it right," she said. Not cruelly. Just honestly.
"Then I’ll make them pay," he said. "Which is the same thing."
It wasn’t the same thing. She knew that.
She sent the money anyway.
*****
Patricia ASHFORD’S POV
She was awake, of course.
Patricia Ashford had not slept properly in eight months. She lay in the too-soft Australian bed and listened to her daughter’s voice on the balcony....not the words, just the tone of it, the particular cadence that she recognized as Victoria talking to her father, and felt the specific, grinding exhaustion of a woman trapped between the two people she loved most as they continued, with absolute dedication, to make everything worse.
She heard the balcony door slide open.
Victoria appeared in the doorway, her silhouette against the Sydney night, her posture the careful upright carriage she maintained at all times now....as though perfect posture could compensate for everything else.
"You were listening," Victoria said.
"I was awake," Patricia said. "How much did he need?"
A pause. "Fifty thousand."
"Victoria."
"I know, Mother."
"That’s our...."
"I know." Victoria came into the room and sat on the edge of Helen’s bed in the dark, the way she used to as a child after nightmares. "I know exactly what it is and what it means and I sent it anyway."
Patricia was quiet for a long moment. She thought about Harold...somewhere in America, in motels, running, still running....and felt the complicated grief of a woman who had loved a man for thirty years and was only now, too late, fully understanding the cost of the particular kind of love he’d required from her.
"What is he planning?" she asked.
"He didn’t say specifically." Victoria looked at her hands in the dark. "He said he needs time. Space. And then he’ll make them pay."
"He’s going to get himself killed," Helen said quietly.
"Maybe."
"Or arrested."
"Also maybe."
Ptricia sat up. Looked at her daughter in the dim light coming through the curtains.....Victoria’s face in profile, the careful blankness she wore now where expressiveness used to live. The surgeries had helped the physical damage more than the doctors had initially predicted. But there were things surgery couldn’t touch.
"And you?" Patricia said. "What do you want, Victoria? Not your father. You."
Victoria was quiet for a long moment.
"I want," she said slowly, "to stop reading articles about Aria on my phone at two in the morning." She paused. "I want to stop seeing photographs of them together and feeling like something is being taken from me, when the rational part of my brain knows it was never mine to take." Another pause. "I want my hands back." The last one quietly. "I want the version of my life back that existed before all of this."
"That version is gone," Paricia said gently.
"I know." Victoria stood. Moved back toward her own room. "Which is why I sent him the money." She paused in the doorway. "Because if I can’t have that version back, I at least want someone to answer for taking it from me."
Patricia watched her daughter disappear into the dark of the corridor.
She lay back down in the too-soft bed and looked at the ceiling.
She thought about calling Harold herself. Telling him to stop. To stay wherever he was, stay hidden, let it go. She thought about what that conversation would look like, how it would go, what he would say.
She already knew what he would say.
She turned onto her side and closed her eyes.
In the next room, she heard Victoria’s light click off.
****
MARCUS’S POV
The alert came in at 2:47 AM.
A flag on one of the financial monitoring systems he’d set up six months ago when Harold Ashford had first appeared on their radar....a system that tracked a series of accounts connected to the Ashford family network. Dormant accounts, mostly. Things Harold had presumably forgotten Marcus knew about.
One of them had just moved fifty thousand dollars.
Marcus sat up straight. Pulled the trace.
The originating account was registered to a shell company he hadn’t seen before....new, established four months ago. But the IP address of the authorization matched a device registered to a telecommunications account in Sydney, Australia.
He ran the name on the telecommunications account.
V. Ashford.
Marcus sat back in his chair and looked at the screen for a long moment. Then he pulled up a fresh document and began compiling everything.....the account, the amount, the timing, the device registration, the Sydney location.
He didn’t call Damien at 2:47 AM. Damien was upstairs with Aria and the night had already been long enough.
But first thing in the morning, they were going to have a very interesting conversation.
The thread, he wrote at the top of the document, wasn’t as cold as they’d thought.
