Chapter 5 - Victoria’s Ultimatum
By noon, the Manhattan media landscape was a raging firestorm.
A high-society guest had captured a crystal-clear, forty-second video of the slap from the third-row banquet table. The footage was explosive. It showed Victoria’s crimson gown, the cold calculation on her face, the horrific sound of the blow, and the immediate arrival of the attendant holding Victoria’s real diamond ring.
The video had garnered twenty-five million views on social media in less than six hours. The hashtag *#JusticeForLily* was trending worldwide.
Inside her penthouse on Fifth Avenue, Victoria Sterling threw a Lalique crystal vase against the floor. The heavy glass shattered into a thousand jagged pieces across the hardwood.
“How did Julian get the debt notes?!” Victoria screamed into her phone. Her makeup was ruined, her hair disheveled. She was pacing the perimeter of her expansive terrace overlooking Central Park. “Father! Answer me!”
On the other end of the line, Arthur Sterling’s voice sounded twenty years older, broken and hollow.
“It’s over, Victoria,” Arthur whispered. “Julian bought the notes through an anonymous proxy three weeks ago. He was anticipating this. He knew we were vulnerable before you even staged that ridiculous stunt last night. The banks have frozen our credit cards. The federal marshals are arriving at the firm at three o'clock.”
“No! No, this is not over!” Victoria hissed, her fingers digging into the phone until her knuckles turned white. “He has a daughter! Men like Julian are weak because they love things! I will break that little girl until he begs me to stop!”
“Victoria, stop it! The police—”
Victoria hung up the phone and threw it onto the sofa.
She walked over to her writing desk, her breathing shallow and ragged. She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a small black flash drive.
On that drive were the audio files Victoria had secretly recorded over the past four months inside the Vance townhouse. Files where she had manipulated Lily into crying, edited out her own abusive provocations, and pieced together recordings that made Lily sound completely detached from reality. In one edited clip, Lily was crying, *‘I want to hurt them, I want to break everything,’* after Victoria had spent two hours tormenting her with Eleanor’s death.
Victoria picked up her private secondary burner phone and dialed a number she had sworn never to use.
The call connected on the second ring.
“Mr. Cross?” Victoria asked, her voice turning honeyed and lethal.
“Miss Sterling,” came the gravelly voice of Tyler Cross, Manhattan’s most notorious tabloid blackmailer and digital smear coordinator. “I saw the Plaza video. You’re radioactive right now.”
“I have eighty gigabytes of audio and video from inside the Vance residence,” Victoria said, staring out at the Manhattan skyline. “I have recordings that prove Eleanor Vance was a manic depressive who abused that child, and that the child has severe violent tendencies. I want it everywhere. Every news outlet, every social media feed, every parenting blog. I want Julian Vance labeled an enabler of a violent, disturbed monster by nightfall.”
“That kind of blitz costs half a million dollars, upfront,” Cross replied coolly.
“You’ll get a million,” Victoria lied without flinching. “Just upload the first batch. Make sure the headline reads: *‘The Gilded Monster: What Really Happened Before the Plaza Slap.’*”
“Consider it done,” Cross said, ending the call.
Victoria looked at her reflection in the glass terrace doors. Her eyes were sunken, dark with an obsessive hatred.
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“You think you can cast me out, Julian?” she whispered to the empty room. “I will make sure your daughter is remembered as a diseased curse for the rest of her life.”
***
