Chapter 101 Take or Be Taken

Chapter 101 Take or Be Taken
"Sit," she said.

I sat.

The soldiers stayed in the corridor. The captain pulled the door without closing it fully, which was the arrangement we'd agreed on.

Victoria sat across from me, the city still visible through the window behind her, her composure fully reassembled now. She looked at me for a long moment.

"You want to know why," she said.
"I already know why," I said. "I want to know how you got here."

She looked at the window.

"My husband's name was Edmund," she said. "Very wealthy. Very respected. He was charming at first, acting sweet and caring, buying me gifts." She paused. "He chose me when I was twenty two. I thought that meant something. I didn't understand yet what being chosen by a man like that actually meant."

I didn't say anything.

"He hit me for pleasure," she said, her voice carrying no more weight on those words than on any of the others. "Not anger. Not frustration. For pure pleasure!" She looked at her hands. "No friends. No staff. No money of my own despite living inside considerable wealth. He controlled every surface of my life and called it love and expected me to call it the same."

The room was very quiet.

"I had nothing," she said. "Nothing that was mine. Nothing I had built or chosen or earned. Just a house that belonged to him and a life that belonged to him and a body that belonged to him." She looked up at me. "Do you understand what it does to a person, living like that for long enough?"

"Tell me," I said.
"It teaches you that the only power available to you is the power people don't think to guard against," she said. "Men guarded their money. Their status. Their reputations. They never guarded against a woman who smiled warmly and paid attention and remembered what they said." She almost smiled at her words. "That turned out to be worth more than any of the things they were protecting."

She stood and moved to the window, looking out at the city below.

"There was a colleague," she said. "Someone Edmund worked with who had noticed things without saying anything for a long time. His name was Dravenor." She said the name flatly. "He loved me. Or believed he did. He wanted to help me." She paused. "The poison was in the water I gave to Dravenor to pass to Edmund. He didn't know what it was. He only knew I'd asked him to do something small for me and he did it because he would have done anything I asked."

She turned back toward the room.

"That night," she said, "I made sure Edmund had no complaints about me. I gave him everything he wanted. And while I fucked him like a good girl I was, the poison worked, and by the time I was finished, he was gone, and the doctor called it cardiac arrest, and Edmund was buried in a very expensive coffin attended by very important people who said very kind things about him."

I looked at her.

"Dravenor covered it," she said. "He was thorough. He had resources and he used them and he believed that what he'd done made us partners in something. That it entitled him to me." She sat back down. "He was wrong. He was gentler than Edmund but the structure was the same. A man deciding what I owed him for what he'd provided." She looked at the gun on the table. "When he decided to use what he knew against me, I reminded him that he was more exposed than I was. When that stopped being enough, I handled it."
"And then Adrian…" I said.

"And then Adrian." Something in her voice changed at the name. "He was the first man who sat across from me and didn't look at my face or my body or calculate what I owed him. He looked at how I thought. What I noticed. How I moved through a room." She paused. "He told me his plans and where a woman with my particular skills would be useful and he meant it." She looked at me. "I had spent my entire adult life being managed. Adrian was the first man who offered to work with me instead."
"So you joined him?" I said.
"I joined what he was building," she said. "Because what he was building was the closest thing to safety I had ever been offered. An organization with enough power that nobody could touch me. Enough influence that the things I'd done stayed buried." She held my gaze. "I learned from watching Edmund and Dravenor that men could be led anywhere if you understood what they actually wanted underneath what they said they wanted. I learned from Adrian that the same skill applied to governments and committees and entire populations."
"And you stopped caring who got hurt in the process," I said.

She looked at me without flinching.

"I stopped being able to afford to care," she said. "There's a difference." She leaned forward slightly. "I suffered.  For years I suffered because of men who had power over me and used it without restraint. Everything I've done since has been to make sure that never happens again." She paused. "I won't apologize for that."
"I'm not asking you to," I said.

She looked at me carefully.

"What are you asking for then?" she said.
"Nothing," I said. "I'm just listening."

She studied me for a long moment, working through something behind her expression.

"Adrian wants to meet you," she said. "He's been watching your movements since the broadcast. The bloodline verification. The army..." She paused. "He wants to talk."
"Talk?" I said.
"He believes there's an arrangement that benefits both of you. A Vaelthor heir with legitimate colonial authority working alongside Men of Moon's existing infrastructure rather than against it." She looked at me. "He's not without logic, Liam. You should hear what he has to say before you decide."

I looked at her for a moment. Then I stood.

“I don’t know—”
“Give us a chance. All of the things that happened were Daniel’s doing. Not us. We told him the people needed a different approach, that they needed to be heard. Why do you think we gave them stable gravity?”
“You still didn’t give them full support gravity!”

She took a deep breath, adjusting her posture.

“We couldn’t. They couldn’t handle it, and spending money on programs to walk in gravity like the F.L.A while we were dealing with giving them food would’ve been impossible."

I started to think about what she had to say. I shook my head as I got up slowly. 

"I'll visit him," I said.

I walked to the door and pulled it open.

Then I stopped with my hand on the frame and looked back at her, sitting at the table with the gun beside her and the city behind her.

"I'll visit him," I said. "But not to help him. I’m going to kill him."

I closed the door fast.

The sound that followed wasn't immediate. It gave me four full steps down the corridor, enough to round the corner, before the charge in the ventilation above Victoria's room did what the soldiers had spent our conversation setting up.

The corridor shook.

The door we'd come through disappeared inside a pressure wave that rolled through the building's structure and kept going, windows in the rooms we passed blowing inward, the lights cutting out and the emergency system coming up red a second later.

I entered her room, and found her laying on the floor, blood over her mouth.

“Why did you—”
“I had to. I don’t believe a single damn thing that comes out of your mouth. And even if the breathless dome was true, you still ordered to kill my parents, tell my friend what had happened to try to take me in… all of that still counts.”

She coughed in pain.
“At least pull the trigger on me. Please.” 
“No. Die slow for what you have done.”

And with that, I left the room, and walked alongside the captain.