Chapter 153 Her father's reason

Chapter 153 Her father's reason
Victoria's face slowly changed.

Her mother.

She barely remembered her.

Most of what she knew about the woman came from old photographs and the few memories her father had shared with her over the years. She had been too young when her mother died to understand what had happened, and as she grew older, she had stopped asking about it.

Maybe because her father never liked talking about it.

"Jonathan Clark was my business partner, my friend, or so I thought. Everything was working out well, and we decided to do something together, something huge."

Victoria listened without interrupting.

She could hear the bitterness in her father's voice now. This wasn't the anger he had shown her moments ago. This was something deeper, something that had clearly been sitting inside him for years.

"The bastard stabbed me at the back at the crucial moment and took everything away to himself. He let my business crumble and just walked away."

Victoria's eyebrows pulled together.

She had always known her father had struggled before becoming successful again after his business took a but hit that brought them down for months, but she had never known someone was responsible for it. She had never known that the man her father hated so much had once been his friend.

"The betrayal must have happened at the worst possible time," she thought, but she kept the thought to herself.

"Your mother fell ill and all our relatives deserted us. We had no money to pay for her hospital bills and... She died."

Victoria swallowed.

Suddenly, her mother's death didn't feel like the simple tragedy she had always known it as.

There had been more to it.

Her father had lost his business, his closest friend, and then his wife, all within the same period. No wonder he had changed. No wonder he had become the kind of man who trusted no one and always wanted to have control over everything around him.

"After everything, I picked myself up and got back to my feet. I restarted the business with a help from..." Her father turned to look at her step mother, the woman she was forced to call mother who smiled at him, taking a few steps forward to stand next to him. "With from the woman who is now your mother, and because of that you are able to live the privilege life you now do."

Victoria's eyes briefly moved to her mother.

She had never thought much about the woman's role in their lives either. To her, she was simply the woman her father married after her mother's death. The woman who made her life hell.

Now, she wondered how much of their life together had been built from the pieces of the life her father had lost.

"So yes." Her father nodded, letting out a shato sigh. "Yes. I keep you in the house because I don't want you to experience the say thing I did. I didn't want you to be betrayed."

Victoria's expression softened slightly, but only for a moment.

She understood what her father was saying.

She understood the fear behind it.

But... She almost died!

"And yes, I made you indirectly watch that bastard's son."

Her chest tightened again.

Nelson. Her mind immediately went to him.

She thought about everything that had happened between them, everything they had gone through, and how completely unaware he had been that someone was watching him because of her.

Then she thought of Irene.

Her bestfriend had been so paranoid because of this person, someone who her father hired.

Victoria's father wasn't done. Since his daughter wanted the entire story, he was willing to give that to her.

"Few years ago we met at a party and the man had the guts to offer me a handshake and a passive apology." The scoffed, the anger back in his eyes. "He thought what he did was something I could ever just joke about. It wasn't."

Victoria could see the hatred in her father's eyes now.

It wasn't something that had appeared recently.

It had been there for years.

Whatever had happened between him and Jonathan Clark had never ended for him. He had carried it with him all this time, and somehow, Nelson had become part of that old hatred simply because he was his father's son.

Victoria slowly looked at her father, trying to process everything he had just told her.

She had come into the room believing that her father might have been involved in what happened to her.

Now she knew he had.

Maybe he hadn't ordered anyone to hurt her. Maybe the man he hired had only been instructed to watch Nelson. But that didn't change the fact that his decision had put her in danger.

And the worst part was that her father still seemed convinced that he had done nothing wrong.

"So yes again. I hate the Clarks."

"Is that... Is that why you want to hurt Nelson?"

Victoria's voice had become quieter, almost as though she was afraid of the answer she was about to receive. She had already heard enough to understand that her father wanted revenge against the Clarks, but she still couldn't understand how far he was willing to go for it.

Her father stared at her for a moment before his expression hardened again.

"What's the joy in hurting Jonathan? He made me lose my wife, made you lose your mother. I want him to feel the same pain. I want him to lose his son."

Victoria's eyes widened.

For a second, she couldn't believe what she had heard.

She had been hoping that maybe her father only wanted Nelson watched. Maybe he wanted information about him. Maybe he wanted to scare him or somehow get back at Jonathan through his son, but killing him?

That was different.

"Dad, you..."

She couldn't even finish.

Her father had already convinced himself that what he was doing was justified. He didn't see Nelson as a person who had done anything wrong. He saw him as Jonathan's son, and that alone had been enough for him to become a target.

"Do you know how twisted the person you hired was?" She asked, her voice rising."He wanted to kill... Me. He wanted to kill me, Dad."

The memory of what had happened still made Victoria's stomach turn.

She had been the one who got caught in the middle. She had been the one who came face to face with the danger her father had created without even knowing it. And the worst part was that if things had gone differently, she might not have been standing there having this conversation with him.

"What if I was really dating him?" She asked again, a tear falling down her cheek.

She was crying.