Chapter 186
Chapter 186
Victoria got there before Death could.
Victoria's hand clamped down hard on the blade. The sharp edge bit into her palm, blood seeping through her fingers and running down the knife's blood groove in a steady stream. Drop after drop, still warm, hit Benjamin's chest.
The knife tip had already pierced a quarter of an inch into his neck, but before it could deliver that fatal blow, her hand locked it in place like a vice.
The buzz-cut man's eyes went wide in the darkness. He pressed down with every ounce of strength he had, veins bulging from his hand all the way up his left forearm, muscles hard as stone. But the knife didn't budge an inch—like it had been welded in midair.
He stared at Victoria in disbelief. How could this woman be so strong? And did she feel no pain?
Victoria's palm kept bleeding, the sharp blade embedded in her flesh. He could even feel that teeth-gritting resistance as the blade scraped against the bone in her hand. Yet her expression didn't change at all, as if that hand didn't belong to her.
Victoria knelt beside Benjamin, her right hand gripping the blade while her left hand shot up, gun aimed at the center of the buzz-cut man's forehead.
At this distance, he could even make out the residual gunpowder marks at the end of the suppressor in the faint light, smell the acrid burn of spent powder from the barrel. His mouth opened, trying to form words—pleas for mercy or curses.
But Victoria didn't give him that chance.
She pulled the trigger.
Thump.
The suppressor compressed the gunshot into a muffled thud. The bullet entered through the center of his forehead and exited through the back of his skull, spraying a warm mist of blood across the floor-to-ceiling window behind him.
His body went rigid for an instant, then fell backward stiff as a board. The back of his head hit the tile with a dull crack. His eyes were still open, pupils already dilated, his face frozen in that final second of disbelief.
The knife slipped from his loosened grip. Victoria tossed it aside, the sound of metal striking tile especially crisp in the darkness.
The moment the blade pulled free from her palm, the wound lost its plug. Blood flowed faster now, running down her fingertips to pool in a small patch of dark red on the floor.
Victoria could feel the dull ache deep in her palm. This wasn't an ordinary cut—the blade had sliced through the palmar aponeurosis, cutting into the muscle layer beneath.
But she didn't tend to her own hand.
Victoria looked down, quickly examining the wound on Benjamin's neck in the darkness.
Not deep. No major artery hit. Blood loss within manageable limits. She pressed her fingertip against the bleeding point, then quickly tore a strip of fabric from the hem of her shirt, wrapped it around his neck, and applied a simple pressure bandage.
Every movement was efficient and precise. Utterly professional.
Completely disregarding how these actions made her own hand bleed faster and harder.
Benjamin lay sprawled on the floor, covered in blood, eyes fixed straight on her.
His mind went blank. Not from blood loss, but because he couldn't comprehend what had just happened.
Victoria had saved him!
This woman he'd targeted from the start, framed, even tried multiple times to destroy—she'd just caught with her bare hand the knife aimed at his throat. Her blood and his blood mixed together, dripping onto him, burning him with shame.
He opened his mouth, trying to speak, but only a muffled sound came out—like something was stuck in his throat. Tears came before words could, mixing with the blood on his face as they ran down, leaving him utterly wretched.
He thought about everything he'd done to Victoria before.
Humiliating her humble origins in front of the entire Howard family at their first meeting. Deliberately inciting employees at the company to isolate and target her. Setting her up to be humiliated at business galas. Even orchestrating her involvement in the Port Liberty deal, hoping she'd die at Zane's hands.
Every single incident was enough to make her hate him to the bone. She should hate him. She should have stood back and watched that knife fall, pretended she knew nothing, let him die. After all, in such dim conditions, with William so far away, no one would suspect her.
But she hadn't.
"Why are you crying? You're not going to die," she said flatly.
Benjamin suddenly couldn't hold it together anymore. What had been silent tears turned into full-blown sobbing.
Not fear of his brush with death, not terror of dying, but an overwhelming, inescapable shame.
That shame felt like a hand reaching into his chest, squeezing his heart, forcing out his arrogance, his prejudice, his stupidity one by one, leaving him with nowhere to hide.
He'd looked down on her before, thought she wasn't good enough for William, assumed she'd married William for the Howard family's status and money. He'd always believed what he was doing was for William's sake—protecting William, helping him weed out people with ulterior motives.
But now he realized how childish, how absurd he'd been.
When William needed help most, it was Victoria who'd fought her way in here alongside him. When he was about to die, it was she who'd caught that blade with her bare flesh.
And what about him? What had he done for William? Besides being a burden, causing trouble—what had he actually done?
"Victoria..." His voice scraped out of his throat, hoarse and broken, thick with tears and congestion, but he called her name with perfect clarity.
He looked at Victoria's stern features and somehow saw a shadow of his William in her. She was just as strong, just as calm—like no matter how huge the crisis, they could handle it like it was nothing.
Benjamin suddenly felt like he'd been blind before. Only a woman like this was a perfect match for his William!
Victoria glanced at him.
She didn't say anything sentimental, just hummed in acknowledgment, then stood up.
The gunfire in the living room had stopped. The air still hung heavy with gunpowder, mixed with the metallic tang of blood and the lingering sweet notes of sevoflurane, churning together in the darkness into a suffocating, murky haze.
As Victoria rose, urgent but orderly footsteps came from the hallway direction, carrying the rhythm of well-trained coordination. Flashlight beams flooded in from the doorway, several shafts of light crisscrossing through the living room, carving the darkness into alternating patches of light and shadow.
Frank's voice rang out from behind the light beams: "Mr. Howard! Mrs. Howard! We're here!"