Chapter 262: Chapter 264: Preparing For Victoria’s Retaliation
Aria lay there and stared at the ceiling.
I’ll do what needs to be done.
She’d made a choice not to ask what that meant. Not because she didn’t have opinions about it or feelings about it....she had plenty of both....but because she’d looked at his face and understood that there was nothing she could say that would change the answer, and more than that, nothing she was entirely sure she wanted to change.
Harold Ashford had poisoned her.
First he kinapped her and then he had deliberately introduced a compound into her system that was designed to kill her and had watched her deteriorate in a hospital room and had felt, she suspected, something closer to victory than remorse.
She’d spent two weeks in that hospital trying to be reasonable about it. Trying to frame it as a desperate man making desperate choices. Trying to see it as him taking revenge for what she did to his company, for exposing his crimes and making him go bankrupt.
She believed he was taking his revenge .
She just also understood, lying in the morning light with the ghost of Damien’s warmth still on the sheets beside her...that the man who had just walked out of this room carrying the weight of two attempts on her life was not interested in proportionate response. And that some part of her, the part that was still catching up to everything her body had been through, didn’t entirely blame him for that.
She thought about what Marcus had found. Victoria in Australia, patient and quiet and possibly preparing for a comeback.
Then a voice in her head told her what she had been trying to avoid thinking you about for weeks now.
’’She’s not going to try poison you or kidnap you Aria. She’s going to try to dismantle everything you have the same way you did to her family.’’
Aria didn’t know where that thought came from but she knew as soon as it arrived that it was right. Victoria wasn’t Harold. Victoria was something more calculated and more personal and considerably more dangerous in the specific ways that Aria understood were actually harder to defend against.
You could secure a building against a man with rage and a plan.
You couldn’t as easily secure a life against a woman with patience and nothing left to lose.
She pressed her hands flat against the duvet and breathed.
She was a doctor. She was a hacker. She had broken into this estate with a false name and a desperate plan and pulled it off for weeks, and she had sat across from Damien Blackwood at the height of his suspicion and held her ground, and she had survived two actual attempts on her life.
She was not without resources.
She was not going to lie in this bed and wait for whatever Victoria had been building in Australia to arrive on her doorstep.
She reached for her phone.
She opened a blank note and started writing — everything she knew about Victoria Ashford, everything she’d observed about Victoria. The way Victoria operated. And the things she cared about
By the time Damien came back she had two pages of notes and a direction she could feel taking shape at the edges of her thinking.
He stopped in the doorway when he saw her.
"What are you doing?" he said.
She looked up. Met his eyes.
"Thinking," she said.
He looked at the phone in her hands. The expression on his face moved through several things in quick succession....the particular look he got when she reminded him of what she actually was.
"Aria...."
"I’m not doing anything yet," she said. "I’m thinking." She held his gaze. "You told me what Marcus found. You told me what you’re going to do about Harold. Now I need to think about what I’m going to do about Victoria." A pause. "Because she’s not coming for you, Damien. She’s coming for me. And I’m not going to sit in this room and let her."
The room was very quiet.
Damien looked at her for a long moment.
Then he crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the two pages of notes on her phone screen, his expression unreadable in the specific way that meant he was thinking hard about something.
"Show me," he said finally.
She turned the phone so he could see.
He read. She watched his face as he did....the slight narrowing of his eyes, the shift in his jaw.
"You wrote all of this in twenty minutes," he said.
"I’ve been thinking about her for longer than twenty minutes."
He looked at her. Something in his face that wasn’t quite pride but was adjacent to it.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." He handed the phone back. "But you share everything with me and Marcus. Nothing on your own. Not while you’re still recovering and not ever without telling me first." He held her gaze. "Those are my conditions."
"Fine," she said. "Those are fair."
He nodded once.
Then he reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, his hand staying against her face for a moment in that way he had.
"You’re going to be the death of me," he said quietly.
"Probably," she agreed. "But not today."
His thumb traced her cheekbone.
"Not today," he said.
’’ I have to go to the office today, is there anything you would like me to get for you?’’
Aria smiled and said ’’ I am sure that the house is stocked with everything i need and more, Mrs. Chen and Lucy are bent on ’’fattening’’ me up.
’’And my mother is also coming over today, And i am sure she will bring soups too.’’
So, don’t worry about me and go to work. She kissed him. and he held her there for a while longer, the he pulled back and patted her head.
’’Okay then since you are in good hands, I’ll see you this evening then’’ . He kissed her forehead and made his way to the bathroom.
Aria watched him go, and a sweet feeling occupied her mind at that moment.
’’It feels nice to be loved by the person you love’’
