The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 118

Chapter 106: Victoria’s Return

Victoria pov

The apartment in Geneva had been lovely while it lasted.

I’d chosen it for the views and the distance – all that clean Swiss air between me and the wreckage I’d left behind – and for weeks I’d woken up in twelve-hundred-thread-count sheets and told myself this was fine. Better, even. A strategic retreat. Every good player knew when to leave the board and regroup.

But then I saw the photo. Someone had caught them outside a bookstore on Linley Street – Caleb in a dark jacket, no tie, carrying a brown paper bag and looking at Bella Hart with an expression I’d spent years trying to earn from him. The photo wasn’t professional quality, some street photographer with good timing, but it had made the morning pages anyway because Caleb Black buying books on a Tuesday night was apparently news.

I’d stared at it for a long time. He’d never looked at me like that. I understood now, with the kind of clarity that distance and humiliation could produce, that he never was going to.

I’d told myself the affair meant something, that a man like Caleb didn’t spend months with a woman out of simple convenience, that somewhere underneath the coldness he felt something more than transactional warmth. I’d believed my own story so thoroughly that when he ended it – calmly, decisively, with the particular cruelty of a man who didn’t even understand he was being cruel I’d been genuinely blindsided.

I’d run to Jade, which had been my first mistake. Jade was unraveling faster than I’d expected – the investigations, the legal exposure, her social capital evaporating in real time and my association with her schemes had not done me any favors when Caleb’s lawyers started tracing the SEC frame job back to its source. I was insulated, technically. I’d been careful. But careful wasn’t the same as clean, and I knew his team was still pulling at threads.

I couldn’t wait for them to pull the right one.

So I’d come back. Quietly, through a different airport, under a name that held up to casual scrutiny. I had a room in a boutique hotel on the east side of the city. I’d left my real luggage in Geneva and brought only the essentials: laptop, two changes of clothes, a burner phone, and the folder I’d been compiling since Geneva.

I opened it now, spread across the narrow hotel desk, and looked at what I had. The threat Margaret had sent – a copy of that text, intercepted through a contact at the mobile carrier. Good. That established the Hart family’s pattern of escalating harassment.

The photos of Tom from before the media broke the story-timestamps showing someone had been monitoring that daycare weeks before the visit. Not my work; Jade’s. But Jade was sloppy, and there was something she’d said back in October, when she thought she was among friends, something about a resource at Bella’s building, a name she’d mentioned once and probably forgotten.

I hadn’t forgotten.

I crossed to the window and looked down at the street, arms folded, thinking. The frame job had failed because we’d underestimated Bella – a mistake I would not make again. She was brilliant and fast and she had Caleb’s resources behind her now, and a direct attack was not going to work.

1/2

<Chapter 106elona’s Return

+25 Points

But Bella had a past she’d clearly rather keep buried. Margaret’s text had confirmed it – things about your past that Tom’s going to find out sooner or later. Whatever had happened in those early years after she fled, whatever the period between the wedding and London contained, it was evidently enough to make Bella go still and careful when it was mentioned.

I didn’t know the contents yet. But I knew where to look. I picked up the burner phone and typed a message to the only person in Silverton still willing to take my calls.

I’m back. I have something you want. Meet me

I put the phone on the desk and looked at the folder again, and the photo of Caleb looking at Bella like she was the only one for him, as I felt anger rise inside of me, I’d spent years building my life around the idea of Caleb Black. I wasn’t going to watch someone else occupy the space I’d constructed in my own mind as mine.

If I couldn’t have him, I could at least make sure what they were building together was built on something as unstable as possible. I began to type.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify