Chapter 15 - The Queen’s Ransom
Julian did not lower his weapon. His thumb rested firmly on the hammer, his knuckles white against the grip. “Mr. David Montague left explicit sovereign orders, Madame Vance. The master vault belongs to Claire. Your shares were revoked forty years ago by the Swiss Federal Council.”
“Orders written by a dead coward who hid behind farm fences while I rebuilt the family fortune from Monaco to Zurich,” Victoria said coldly, dismissing Julian as if he were an annoying draft. She took three slow steps forward, her polished leather boots clicking against the marble floor until she stood barely three feet from me.
The scent of her hit me—jasmine, expensive tobacco, and vintage amber. It was suffocatingly aristocratic.
“Look at you,” she whispered, reaching out a black-gloved hand toward my cheek.
I knocked her hand away with a violent sweep of my arm. “Don't touch me.”
Victoria’s eyes narrowed slightly, but the amusement never left her lips. “Fierce. Just as I hoped. David raised you with his pathetic suburban morality, yet my blood screams within you. Do you really believe Conrad and Arthur acted alone? Do you think a bumbling idiot like Richard Vance came up with the idea to pursue you in New York all by himself?”
The room seemed to drop ten degrees. My breath hitched in my chest. “What did you say?”
“Richard was an errand boy,” Victoria sneered. “Arthur was a blunt hammer. When I saw you graduating top of your class at Columbia, refusing every handout, fighting for every dollar, I knew David had failed to extinguish the flame. But you lacked killer instinct. You were soft. You believed in honesty, love, and family loyalty. Weak concepts that make easy prey in Geneva.”
She turned, gesturing to one of her guards, who placed a heavy titanium briefcase on the stone pedestal beside the ancient ledger.
“I fed Richard the financial secrets that led him to you,” she continued calmly. “I instructed Arthur to orchestrate your father’s bankruptcy. I allowed Evelyn to humiliate David at that pathetic birthday dinner. I needed you stripped of every illusion. I needed you pushed into a corner where you had only two choices: perish in the dirt, or rise as a monster capable of reclaiming the Vance-Montague throne.”
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“You destroyed David’s life... to test me?” Tears burned behind my eyelids, not of grief, but of incandescent rage. “He loved me! He protected me from you!”
“He hid you like a stolen trinket!” Victoria snapped, her voice suddenly slicing through the air like a razor. “He denied you your birthright! Today, the House of Vance has fallen, Conrad is in a federal holding cell, and the vault is unlocked. I have brought you to the mountaintop, Claire. Sign the sovereign co-regency treaty inside that case. Together, we will control the largest private capital reserve in Europe. Refuse... and you will discover that Arthur’s cruelty was mere child’s play compared to mine.”