Chapter 21: Victoria’s Growing Anxiety

Kaelen's POV

The moment I opened the doors fitted with brass in the family library in Toorak, I was hit by the smell of dry mahogany, old paper and costly French lavender.

It was a room designed to show off absolute power, consisting of double-height shelves filled with bound leather books, oil paintings of the long-dead Vance patriarch, and thick curtains which kept out the rain in Melbourne.

With her back straight and seated in the high-backed armchair in the middle of the room, my mother did not appear to be a woman who had built her empire on a mountain of lies. She was sitting perfectly upright in her dark plum wool suit, a single strand of South Sea pearls shining around her neck as she wrote carefully in a thick leather ledger with a gold fountain pen.

She did not look up when my boots made heavy steps across the Persian rug.

"I told Arthur you wouldn't be attending the morning briefing," Victoria said, her voice smooth and well-polished showing no warmth at all.

The nib of her pen scratched in a regular rhythm against the thick paper.

"The press have started publishing headlines concerning Aegis Capital's market movements. The board is terrified, Kaelen. They need their Chief Executive to display strength, not to be wandering round the coastal backwaters chasing ghosts."

"I found the ghost, Victoria," I said.

My voice was low, flat, filled with a quiet yet deadly seriousness which caused her pen to stop scratching at once.

The gold nib of the pen was held a millimetre above the page. A single, minute drop of black ink collects at the tip before falling onto the cream-colored paper. Victoria carefully capped the pen, placed it across the open ledger, and looked up at me.

Her sharp blue eyes—eyes which had previously directed boardrooms for forty years—examined my face with cold and mathematical accuracy. She observed the dampness of my coat, the mud drying on the heels of my leather boots, and the dark circles of exhaustion underneath my eyes.

"You look terrible," She said, leaning back in her leather chair lacing her diamond-ringed fingers together over her knee.

"I take it Dr. Croft dealt with the matter in Port Campbell neatly? The girl should be undergoing federal processing by now."

“Valkyrie is not in federal custody," I said, moving closer to the desk until my shadow covered her ledger. "She never was."

Although Victoria's posture did not change, there was a very slight tightening at the edges of her eyes. "So Croft has failed; I'll have his medical licence cancelled before noon."

"Croft didn't fail,” I replied, my voice dropping to an octave. “He had played you. Just as Valkyrie played your security team and like you played me four years before."

I grabbed a thick manila folder from my coat pocket, it had a red CONFIDENTIAL stamp on it, and threw it down on the marble desk.

The file hit the desk with a heavy thud between us.

Victoria didn't touch it; she looked at the red seal and her jaw tightened into a stiff, aristocratic line. "What is this?"

“The official internal audit file concerning the 2022 liquidation of Vance Energy," I said, my voice filled with suppressed fury. "The file you ordered sealed four years ago under corporate privacy protocols. I had my personal cyber security team break the biometric lock on the vault two hours ago.”

"You breached family vault protocols?” Victoria's voice at last gave up its cold composure and cut sharply, like a whip. She got up slowly, placing her hands flat on the marble desk, looming across from me.

"Are you out of your mind, Kaelen? That file contains proprietary trade secrets! Reopening those records invalidates our insurance settlement and opens the firm to federal regulatory oversight!”

"It doesn't just have the trade secrets, Victoria," I growled, advancing on her quickly and squeezing my knuckles so they went white and placed both hands down on the desk. "It has the compiler hashes for the leaked code. The dummy file."

The silence that followed was suffocating. The rain beating against the high arched windows was like gravel being thrown against glass.

Victoria did not flinch, but her throat moved as she swallowed firmly. "I have no idea of what technological nonsense you're referring to—"

"Stop lying to me!" I shouted.

The noise broke the silence in the library as a gunshot would. Outside the hallway, the two family security guards became uneasy, but neither of them opened the door.

I took shallow, wild breaths as I looked directly into my mother's eyes, "I ran the forensic line analysis myself. Valkyrie never downloaded the operational framework; she was set up using an expiring sandbox trap—a trap which had been coded on a terminal linked to your personal administrative account."

Victoria stared at me, her eyes narrowing until they became sharp, calculating slits. The false appearance of being concerned as a mother slipped completely, revealing the ruthless corporate dictator beneath.

"She was a nobody, Kaelen," Victoria whispered, lowering her voice to a sharp, bitter hiss which made my blood run cold.

"She was a poor, broken orphan from the docks with a sick sister who would have emptied your personal trust fund in six months. You were ready to give her your name! You were ready to have her placed on the board! She would have ruined everything that this family had built over three generations!"

"She was my wife!" I yelled, my chest rising and falling as I suffered a pain so intense and sharp.

"She was carrying my child!"

Victoria laughed, making a brief, cold, and dreadful noise, devoid of human warmth.

"You think that boy in Port Campbell is your child?" Victoria scoffed, leaning across the desk until her face was just inches away from mine. "She went to a fishing village and stayed with a local doctor who was disgraced, Kaelen! They lived together for four years! You're pursuing a ghost who had exchanged her body for cheap compounded medicine!"

Every drop of air escaped from my lungs as my eyes locked onto hers with a deadly promise of violence which caused her breath to catch in her throat.

"If you ever call my son a bastard again," I whispered, my voice terribly calm. “I'll remove your name from every foundation, every chair, and every building in this city. I will personally sign the documents authorizing the handing of these audit files to the Securities Commission."

Victoria’s pale face lost the last of its color. She took a slow step back, sinking back into her chair, her hand trembling slightly as she touched her pearl necklace.

"Let the past remain buried, Kaelen," she whispered, her voice containing a sinister and frantic warning that froze me to the bone.

"Do you really think you're helping her? Do you really think you can simply take her home and treat her as part of the family? You have no conception of the forces that were set in motion four years ago to safeguard this company. If you continue to investigate those files... you'll not only destroy me but you'll put a bullet into that girl's head."

My encrypted mobile phone shook violently on the desk placed between us before I had a chance to reply.

I picked it up, making sure my eyes stayed on my mother's face. "Speak."

"Mr. Vance," Devlin's voice through the speaker, full of pure panic.

"There's an emergency at the Port Campbell property! The secondary clinic transmitter of Dr. Croft has just flatlined, and local emergency services just received a call from the cottage!"

My heart ceased beating for a moment. "What happened?"

"A fire, sir," Devlin gasped on the phone. "Both the pump shed and the rear wing of the cottage are completely surrounded by flames, and Valkyrie... Valkyrie was seen running into the burning building in order to get to Chloe."