THE HEIR'S REVENGE

chapter 72

That was settled.

Lily was okay with it so I let it be.

“Don't worry, we'll get ice cream one of these days.”

“It's fine, I understand that you are busy.” Lily said with a smile. Sometimes, I was so proud of her, she was the kind of girl who would understand you.

I just had to make sure she wasn't saying no because of me. She went upstairs to her room saying that she'd like to have some rest before dinner.

I smiled.

When I was her age, I didn't have time to rest. It was wrong for me to be resting when there was so much house work waiting for me.

I loved this life for her.

She deserved it and she was such a sweet soul too. Little girls like her deserve the world. I went upstairs with Henry after he had one glass of water.

He must have been starving seeing that he drank the whole glass in one gulp. When we got upstairs, let me read the uploaded file first.

Henry finished his water and we went upstairs together.

The house was quiet now that Emma had left and Lily had gone to her room. That specific afternoon quiet that settled over the mansion when everyone had gone their separate ways and the morning's noise had finally run out of energy.

We went into the study and I sat down at my desk.

Henry sat across from me like he always did when we had something serious to discuss. He straightened his jacket. He put his hands on his knees. He looked at me with that steady professional face that said we are moving to the next thing now.

"Tell me what you found out," I said.

Because that was why he had come this morning. Before Emma arrived and turned everything sideways. Before Yemi walked through the kitchen door and saw something that I had not yet had the chance to explain properly. Before Lily got involved in an ice cream plan that was never going to happen.

Henry had come with something and I still did not know what it was.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

He put it on the desk between us.

I looked at it without touching it.

"Victoria made a phone call two nights ago," he said. "From the facility where she is being held. Prisoners are allowed monitored calls and this one was monitored." He paused. "The prosecutor's office shared the transcript with us this morning."

"Who did she call?" I asked.

"Not Daniel," Henry said. "Not her lawyer. Not anyone we expected."

"Then who?"

"A woman named Margaret Vane," he said. "Her older sister."

I stared at him.

I did not even know Victoria had a sister.

"I did not know she had a sister," I said out loud.

"Most people do not," Henry said. "Margaret Vane has lived abroad for the past thirty years. Switzerland primarily. She and Victoria were not close by most accounts. They communicated rarely." He paused. "Until two nights ago."

I picked up the transcript and read it.

It was short. The call lasted four minutes and twenty seconds.

Most of it was ordinary. Victoria asks about Margaret's health. Margaret asked about the case in the careful way of someone who already knew about it but was pretending to be learning for the first time.

Then near the end Victoria said something that made me read it twice.

She said: you know what to do with what I gave you. Make sure it gets to the right person.

Margaret said: are you sure about this?

Victoria said: I have never been more sure of anything.

Then the call ended.

I put the transcript down.

I looked at Henry.

"What did she give her?" I asked.

"That is what we do not know yet," Henry said. "Margaret Vane has not made any visible move since the call. She has not contacted anyone connected to the case. She has not contacted Ethan's legal team or the prosecutor or any journalist." He folded his hands. "But she is in the city."

"She came here?"

"She arrived yesterday morning," Henry said. "She is staying at a hotel in the north district."

I sat back in my chair.

Victoria was in custody and still playing chess.

She had made one move that looked like surrender and underneath it she was making a completely different move through her sister. Through someone nobody was watching because nobody knew she existed.

This was so Victoria that it almost made me want to laugh.

Almost.

"What could she have given her?" I asked, thinking out loud. "Documents? Money? Information?"

"Any of those," Henry said. "Or something else entirely." He was quiet for a moment. "There is one other possibility I want you to consider."

"Say it," I said.

"Victoria has spent twenty years being careful," Henry said. "She has built layers and deniability and distance between herself and everything she has done. We have been dismantling those layers one by one." He paused. "What if she built one more layer that we have not found yet. Something she has been keeping separate from everything else. A final protection."

I looked at the transcript.

Make sure it gets to the right person.

"She is trying to protect something," I said.

"Or someone," Henry said.

We sat with that for a moment.

The afternoon sun was coming through the study window falling across the desk between us. Outside I could hear a bird somewhere in the garden. The faint sound of the city beyond the walls.

"We need to find out what Margaret Vane is carrying," I said.

"Yes," Henry said. "I have already started looking into it."

"Of course you have," I said.

He picked up the transcript from the desk and folded it carefully and put it back in his jacket pocket.

"There is one more thing," he said.

"What?"

He looked at me with the expression he used when he was about to say something personal in the careful way he always said personal things. Like he was handling something that could break if he was not careful with it.

"Yemi called me this afternoon," he said.

I was very still.