Chapter 297: Chapter 299: Victoria Went To See Mei
MARCUS’S POV
The last link took him fifty one hours.
He’d told Damien forty eight. He’d been wrong by three hours which he noted privately and would not be mentioning to anyone.
Meridian’s verification system was the problem. He’d gotten into the edges of it two days ago....confirmed the account existed, confirmed the timeline, confirmed the payment structure. What he hadn’t been able to confirm was the identity documentation attached to the account.
Meridian used a third party verification service called Carvo based in Luxembourg. Carvo processed identity documents for financial service clients across forty countries and had security infrastructure that was, genuinely, very good.
Not perfect.
Nothing was perfect.
He found the imperfection at two AM on the third night. A legacy API endpoint that Carvo had deprecated eighteen months ago but hadn’t fully closed....a door that was supposed to be locked but had been left with the latch slightly up. It took him four hours to get through it and another two to find what he needed without triggering anything that would flag the intrusion.
At six AM he had it.
The identity document attached to the Meridian private arrangement account opened seven months ago in Sydney.
A passport scan.
Australian issued, which made sense....she’d have acquired Australian documentation during her time there. The photograph was the one thing the document couldn’t disguise.
Victoria Ashford looked directly at him from the passport photograph with the composed expression of a woman who had learned to look neutral for official documents.
He sat back.
He looked at the screen for a moment.
Then he started building the file.
Everything. The server access. The car. The hotel on 54th. The book....Bernard Lau, the Meridian account, the Sydney timeline, the passport scan. Claire Mercer’s encrypted channel, which he hadn’t been able to crack directly but which he could now connect to the Meridian account through the payment trail. The Chelsea hotel. The second file.
All of it. Linked. Documented. The chain complete from one end to the other.
He was halfway through compiling it when his phone rang.
Not Damien.
Sebastian. The estate’s head of household, who called Marcus approximately four times a year and whose name on a screen at six forty AM meant something had happened.
He picked up.
"Marcus," Sebastian said. "Mrs Chen is here."
He went still. "Aria’s mother."
"Yes. She arrived twenty minutes ago. She’s with Mrs Abel in the kitchen." A pause. "She’s....she asked for you specifically. Not Damien. You."
"Is she alright."
"Physically yes." Another pause. "She’s shaken. Something happened. She won’t tell Mrs Chen what."
Marcus was already closing the laptop.
"Tell her I’m five minutes away," he said.
****
MEI’S POV
She hadn’t planned to come to the estate.
She’d gotten in a cab without thinking about where she was going....just away, away from the street outside her building, away from the conversation that had happened on the pavement twenty minutes ago and given the driver the address because it was the address her body apparently knew to go to when something was wrong.
Mrs Chen had opened the door and taken one look at her face and brought her inside and put tea in front of her without asking a single question, which was exactly what Mei had needed.
She sat at the kitchen table and wrapped both hands around the cup and looked at the steam rising from it.
She was not going to cry.
She was sixty two years old and she had been through things that made this morning look very small and she was not going to sit in her daughter’s kitchen and cry.
Marcus came in at six fifty.
He sat down across from her without ceremony and looked at her face with the specific attention she’d come to associate with him.....not intrusive, just present. Reading the room the way he always did.
"Tell me," he said.
She told him.
She’d been leaving her building at six fifteen. Early, the way she always was....she had a market she liked on the east side that was worth getting to before seven. She’d come out of the building and turned right and gotten maybe twenty feet before she’d understood that the woman walking toward her wasn’t walking past.
She was walking toward.
Mei hadn’t recognised her immediately. She’d seen photographs.....Aria had shown her, Marcus had shown her, the context of the last weeks meant she knew the name and the face and the history. But photographs and a woman on a pavement at six fifteen AM were different things.
It was the composure that made her recognise her.
The specific, cultivated composure of a woman who had decided exactly what she was going to do and was doing it precisely.
Victoria Ashford had stopped in front of her.
She’d smiled.
Not warmly. Not threateningly. The smile of a woman conducting a meeting.
"Mrs Chen," she’d said. "I think we should talk."
Mei had looked at her.
She’d thought about Aria. About what Aria would do in this moment.....not panic, not run, not give anything away. Stand there and listen and file everything away and call Marcus the moment it was over.
"You have one minute," Mei had said.
Something had shifted in Victoria’s face....a flicker of something that might have been surprise. Then the composure was back.
"Your daughter thinks she’s won," Victoria said. "The article. The responses. The board backing down." She paused. "She hasn’t won. I have one more piece of information that I haven’t released. Something that doesn’t just raise questions....something that ends her career permanently." Another pause. "I want her to know that."
Mei had looked at her steadily. "Why are you telling me."
"Because I want her to know it’s coming," Victoria said. "I want her to have time to think about whether the next few weeks are worth it." She tilted her head slightly. "She could walk away from this quietly. The foundation. The hospital. All of it. Leave the city. Build something somewhere else under....well." A pause that had edges. "We both know she’s good at being someone else."
Mei had said nothing.
"Tell her," Victoria said. "That’s all I’m asking. Tell her I’d like her to consider her options." She’d smiled one more time, that same meeting smile. "I have no interest in destroying her completely. I just want her to understand what the alternative looks like."
She’d turned and walked away.
Mei had stood on the pavement for thirty seconds.
Then she’d gotten in a cab.
