Chapter 7 - The Confession in the Study
I didn't wait for Marcus to finish questioning Richard. I spun back toward my SUV, threw myself behind the wheel, and tore back up the private drive toward the main mansion. My mind raced with terrifying clarity. Victoria hadn't sent her brother to kidnap Lily; she had used him as a distraction to draw my security detail away from the main house while she made her own play for the final cache of documents hidden in my private study safe.
When I screeched to a halt in front of the grand entrance, I didn't use the front doors. I cut across the terrace and threw open the side French doors that led directly into my study.
The room was empty. But the heavy iron-reinforced door of my floor safe—hidden behind a mahogany bookshelf—stood wide open.
Papers were scattered across the Persian rug. And sitting in my leather executive chair, wearing her ruined white wedding gown with the hem stained in dirt and spilled water, was Victoria. She wasn't running. She wasn't hiding. She was holding a small, old-fashioned silver revolver that she had pulled from the hidden wall compartment inside the safe.
As I stepped into the room, the barrel of the gun swung up and pointed directly at my chest. Her hands were steady now, framed by the shattered remnants of her bridal veil.
“Lock the door, Daniel,” she said, her voice chillingly calm. “Don't make a scene. We're past pretending.”
I stopped ten feet away, keeping my eyes fixed on the cold steel barrel. “You had a gun in the safe the entire time. You knew the combination because you studied it over the last six months, piece by piece.”
“Of course I did,” Victoria smiled softly, a bitter, broken expression that didn't reach her eyes. “My father died in a federal prison cell, Daniel, while your family lived in this palace and pretended nothing happened. He didn't embezzle those funds; your father-in-law framed him to take the fall for a corporate collapse they both engineered. I spent five years of my life planning this exact day. I wanted you to love me, Daniel. I wanted you to trust me more than anyone else in the world. And then I wanted to take everything away from you—just like your family took everything away from mine.”
“Sarah knew, didn't she?” I asked quietly, keeping her talking while my hand in my jacket pocket quietly dialed the emergency speed-dial button on my phone to patch Marcus into the room's live audio. “That's why she hid the flash drive in Lily's bag. She figured out who you really were before she passed.”
“Sarah was too smart for her own good,” Victoria spat, her finger tightening slightly on the trigger. “She found my real identification papers in a folder I left in your guest study six months before she died. She threatened to tell you everything. But before she could expose me, her illness took her body. I thought I had won. I thought I had erased all her little warning notes.”
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“Except she hid one where you never thought to look,” I said, taking a slow step forward. “In a five-year-old's toy purse.”
“That brat ruined everything,” Victoria hissed, her voice rising in pitch as the veneer finally cracked completely. “Just like her mother!”
