Chapter 8 - Richard’s RoomNathan found the tapes where Charlotte said they would be.
Not in Victoria’s shelves.
Not in the basement prison.
In Richard Ashcroft’s old study behind the library, in a locked compartment built into the underside of an antique desk. The key to the compartment had been taped beneath the middle drawer, exactly where Charlotte remembered watching Richard hide it years ago through a crack in the wall.
The discovery turned the house inside out.
Police recovered boxes of cassettes, mini-discs, handwritten notebooks, and later digital files copied onto drives. Victoria had been collecting evidence on everyone at Bellrose, yes—but Richard had begun the archive long before her.
He had recorded staff.
Guests.
Business associates.
Family.
Nathan sat in the study at two in the morning while the first tapes played.
Henry stood by the window.
Eleanor, wrapped in a fresh cardigan and still refusing rest, sat on the sofa with Lily asleep against her chest.
The first tape that mattered was dated eighteen years earlier.
Richard’s voice emerged rich, controlled, unmistakable.
“If this becomes necessary,” he said, “the girl in the passage saw too much.”
Nathan’s skin went cold.
Another voice followed—Victoria’s, younger but identical in tone.
“She’s seven.”
“She’s inconvenient.”
“And if someone finds her later?”
“They won’t.”
The room felt suddenly airless.
Eleanor pressed one hand over Lily’s ear even though the child was asleep.
Henry looked ill.
The tape continued.
Victoria asked, “Why am I the only one worried about what sort of man that makes you?”
Richard’s answer came after a long pause.
“Because you need something from me.”
Silence followed.
Then Victoria again, quieter:
“And if I stop needing it?”
“You won’t.”
Nathan stopped the tape.
His hands shook so badly he nearly dropped the recorder.
“My father…” he whispered.
No one tried to comfort him.
There are some revelations too ugly for comfort.
Charlotte, now under medical care in a downstairs guest room because she refused hospital transport until dawn, had told the truth: Richard had begun the machinery of secrecy. Victoria had entered it, exploited it, and eventually mastered it—but she had not built Bellrose’s rot alone.
The next tape explained what she had needed from him.
Money.
Protection.
Silence.
She had been involved with Richard for years before his public marriage to Nathan’s mother began to fracture. When Richard tried to end the affair and send her away quietly, Charlotte saw them together in the lower cellar.
And Richard—fearful of scandal, reputation, inheritance wars—made the unforgivable decision.
He hid the witness.
Victoria, then young and dependent on him, went along with it.
“It should have ended there,” Nathan said dully.
Eleanor looked at him. “Secrets don’t end. They metastasize.”
He looked at her then, really looked. At the woman who had survived three years in darkness and still had enough force left to say something that precise.
“How did she take you?” he asked softly.
Eleanor went still.
Henry turned from the window.
Nathan regretted asking the moment the memory crossed Eleanor’s face, but she answered anyway.
“Lily had a fever that night,” she said. “You were in Chicago for the board meeting.” Nathan closed his eyes. He remembered. “Victoria offered to sit with her so I could sleep for an hour.”
Lily stirred against her but did not wake.
“I woke in the blue room,” Eleanor said. “Drugged. Chained. She told me she’d already started preparing everyone to believe I was unstable.”
Nathan swallowed hard.
“She used your postpartum records,” Henry said.
Eleanor nodded. “And every private frustration I had ever confessed about motherhood. Every exhausted sentence. Every ‘I need a break.’ She turned normal weakness into evidence.”
Nathan wanted to be sick.
Because he remembered those conversations.
Remembered dismissing Eleanor’s insistence that Victoria was too interested in Lily.
Remembered the creeping doubt when Victoria suggested Eleanor needed rest, help, perhaps treatment.
“I helped her,” he said hoarsely.
Eleanor looked at him for a long moment.
“Yes,” she said.
He bowed his head.
Again, no comfort.
The truth had edges and she was done dulling them for him.
Then Henry leaned over the desk. “Nathan.”
He held up one of Richard’s notebooks.
Inside were dates, initials, payment records.
Gavin Holt.
Two former security men.
A private physician.
A notary.
And beside one entry, written in Richard’s own hand long before his death:
If V. ever tries to expose me, remind her who really buried the child.
Nathan stared at the sentence.
Victoria had not merely feared exposure. She had been trapped by Richard too, blackmailed into silence by her own complicity.
Then Richard died.
And suddenly she inherited the archive, the secrets, and the means to reshape the family around them.
“She replaced the jailer,” Henry said quietly.
Eleanor nodded. “Because power was the only thing left that made sense to her.”
At dawn, police arrested Victoria formally on charges that would multiply by the hour.
She requested to speak only once, and only to Nathan.
He went because he needed to hear whether any truth remained.
She sat in the library, wrists cuffed, hair unpinned, her elegance finally shattered.
When Nathan entered, she smiled faintly.
“You heard the tapes.”
“Yes.”
“So now you know your father was worse than I am.”
Nathan stared at her.
“No,” he said. “I know he made you possible.”
For the first time, something like pain moved across her face.
“You think that absolves him?”
“No.” His voice stayed calm. “I think it condemns both of you.”
She looked away.
He almost left then. Almost.
But one question remained.
“Did you ever mean to let Eleanor go?”
Victoria smiled without humor.
“I told myself I would. Every year.”
Nathan waited.
“I never could decide what version of the family would survive her return.”
He opened the door.
Behind him, Victoria said one last thing:
“Lily would have loved me, eventually.”
May you like
Nathan didn’t turn around.
“No,” he said. “She survived you.”
