Victoria: A Novel Novels & Stories

As always, the world could function perfectly without me. Or so I thought. I was sitting on the edge of my bed that evening, shirt half-buttoned, reading a report I couldn’t care less about, when my door opened without a knock. Only one person entered my room like she owned it. Victoria. She glided in with that intoxicating smile she used to win men twice her age. Her perfume hit me first—sweet, expensive, suffocating. She placed herself beside me, running her manicured fingers along my jaw like she had some right to touch me.

Me and Damien and both girls and Gerald, who comes because Hope refuses to go anywhere overnight without him now, which is a situation of her own engineering and I admire it even as I pack his food and his bed and his anxiety toy that the rescue center sent home with him. We stay in a hotel that allows dogs with a dignity that suggests they've seen stranger requests. Victoria's apartment is in Brooklyn. A real apartment, not a penthouse, not a statement. The kind of place that says I'm starting over and I'm choosing smaller on purpose. She opens the door and she looks like herself and not like herself simultaneously. Still precise. Still the careful posture. But something has been set down.

Riley's POV Victoria is waiting in our penthouse when we arrive, sitting on our couch like she belongs there. She's perfectly composed in a white designer dress, every blonde hair in place despite the chaos she's helped create. "Riley. Brett." She stands gracefully, her smile cold as winter. "Congratulations on your little victory with Morrison." "Little victory?" I set down my purse and face her directly. "Your partner in crime just got arrested on federal charges." "Morrison was always expendable. A useful tool who outlived his purpose." Victoria moves to the windows, gazing out at the city like a queen surveying her domain. "Did you really think removing one pawn would end this game?"

he said, his voice dangerously low. “I…went to his house that day,” Victoria began, her voice shaking. “It was a chaotic period for him, with issues finding Grace and Kimberly causing him distress. I had only gone to offer him comfort. I didn't know it would happen; I tried to run from his grip but his grip was too strong on me and he….had his way.” “And you didn't care to tell me when it happened?” Anthony asked, his nose flaring. “I was scared…It was after Zoe's birth and the doctor told me she's SS, that I discovered she's Victor’s child.”

“And now you’re here, following mommy’s playbook. Stripper by night, mooching off the Blackwood fortune by day. Trying to steal what’s meant for actual family. For people with real legacies.” Victoria watched me, her expression one of cool satisfaction. This was the ambush. This was what she’d planned. “You don’t know anything,” I said, standing up. My legs were shaky. “We know enough,” Victoria said softly. She picked up her nearly full iced coffee. “We know you don’t belong here. You’re trash. Trailer trash with a pretty face, trying to climb into a world that will always see you as dirt on its shoe.” Then she threw the drink.

Elena The silence in that study lasted so long I nearly went in after her, my hand actually reaching for the door before it finally opened and Victoria emerged, pale and shaking, a piece of shattered glass still clutched in one bleeding hand. "Victoria, you're hurt—" "I'm fine." She dropped the glass onto a side table like it burned her to hold, wrapping her other hand around the cut without seeming to fully register the pain. "He's coming. Tonight. Here."

Because the room just shifted again. Victoria wasn’t giving orders from Reed House or from Vincent’s side. She was in Damien’s building. Using Catherine’s phone. Like she had access to both worlds already. Like she was always more central than any of us let ourselves admit. “She wasn’t just carrying Vincent’s orders,” I say. “No,” Sebastian says quietly. “She was making her own.” That lands exactly where it needs to. Not on Damien, not on Catherine. On the woman who moved into my house smiling and never left.

She opened the door herself, took one look at our faces, and led us straight to her private sitting room. “Sit,” she ordered. “Both of you.” We sat on the antique sofa. Victoria poured tea with steady hands, then settled into her chair like a queen holding court. “Tell me,” she said. Alexander explained everything — the latest message, Kane’s threats, Lena’s betrayal, Sophia’s sabotage. I added what I knew about my father’s pressure. When we finished, Victoria looked at me for a long moment, then turned to her grandson. “You have a good woman here, Alexander,” she said. “A strong one. The wrong bride turned out to be exactly the right one. But you’re still fighting it.”

Cheers to a new word count 🥳 I am so glad that my book has progressed to this extent. Stay for more chapters. The next day, at the Wade mansion, Victoria was excessively destructive. She broke a lot of expensive ceramic vases, ruined paintings while causing a nuisance that terrified everyone in the house. Rowan and Noah had slept at the guest house since little Noah couldn't fall asleep after having a terrifying experience last night. No one has told him about Victoria's attempt to hurt Noah but ended up stabbing Chef Gladine.

After I have realized that I’m really in my favorite character’s body which is Victoria’s, I hurriedly forced myself to remember the sequences of the story ‘Roses & Thorns’ and there I remembered that she was the third child of Victor Mera and her older brothers are Vinsky and Vigor. As far as what I know, the story will start once Rosan becomes one of her maids. I then asked one of the maids here if there’s someone named Rosan but she said there was none, so I think the story I read in the novel hasn’t started yet.