VICTORIA’S POV - SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - PRIVATE HOSPITAL
Pain.
That was the first thing Victoria Ashford beca aware of as consciousness slowly dragged her up from the darkness. Not just pain....agony. A burning, throbbing, all-consuming sensation that seed to radiate from her hands up through her arms and into her entire body.
Her eyes fluttered open, and harsh fluorescent light made her wince. White ceiling tiles. The steady beep of monitoring equipnt. The antiseptic sll of a hospital.
Where was she?
Victoria tried to piece together her fragnted mories, but everything was hazy, distorted by pain and trauma. She rembered... the warehouse. Cold concrete floor. Darkness. Damien’s face.....not the face of the man she’d loved, but sothing cold and cruel and absolutely terrifying.
And then pain. Unimaginable pain.
"Miss Ashford! You’re awake!" A nurse rushed to her bedside, her accent distinctly Australian. "Don’t try to move yet. Let get the doctor."
Australia? How did she get to Australia?
The nurse disappeared, and Victoria lay there trying to rember. The warehouse. Damien had found out about the post.....the anonymous post she’d made about Aria sleeping her way to the top at Blackwood Enterprises. The blurred photo that anyone who knew Aria could recognize.
She’d thought she was being clever. Thought she was finally striking back at the woman who’d stolen everything from her.
But Damien had found out. Had known it was her.
And what ca next...
Victoria’s breath caught as the mories flooded back. Being grabbed by Marcus and his n. Being thrown into a car. The warehouse....cold and dark and absolutely terrifying. Damien’s voice, cold as ice, asking her if she really thought she could hurt Aria without consequences.
The hunger. God, the hunger. How long had they kept her there? Hours? Days? Ti had lost all aning in that darkness. No food. Barely any water. Just cold concrete and the constant fear of what would happen next.
And then the torture. Not sexual.....Damien had made that clear. "I don’t want you that way, Victoria. I never did. This isn’t about desire. This is about consequences."
She rembered pain....thodical, calculated pain designed to break her without killing her. Rembered begging, pleading, promising she’d never bother them again.
And then Damien’s cold voice: "Break her hands. Both of them. Make sure she never forgets what happens when you threaten what’s mine."
Victoria tried to lift her hands now, to see them, but they were wrapped in thick bandages and elevated on special supports. She could barely feel them beyond the waves of pain that pulsed with every heartbeat.
The door opened, and a middle-aged man in a white coat entered, followed by the nurse. He had the calm, professional deanor of soone who delivered bad news regularly.
"Miss Ashford, I’m Dr. Jas Mitchell. You’re at Sydney Private Hospital. You’ve been unconscious for approximately sixty hours following your surgery." He moved to check her monitors, his expression professionally neutral. "How are you feeling?"
"My hands," Victoria managed, her voice hoarse and raw. "What happened to my hands?"
Dr. Mitchell exchanged a glance with the nurse. "Perhaps we should discuss this once you’re more fully conscious...."
"Tell now." Despite the pain, despite the fog in her brain, Victoria’s voice had steel in it. "I want to know now."
The doctor sighed and pulled up a chair beside her bed. "Your hands sustained severe trauma. Multiple fractures in both hands.....seventeen bones broken in total. Crushed tacarpals, shattered finger bones, significant soft tissue damage." He paused, his expression grave. "Soone did this to you deliberately, Miss Ashford. This wasn’t an accident. This was systematic destruction of the bone structure in both hands."
Victoria closed her eyes. Marcus. Marcus had done it thodically, professionally, while Damien watched with those cold, emotionless eyes.
"We’ve done what we can surgically," Dr. Mitchell continued. "Stabilized the bones with pins and plates. The tissue will heal. But Miss Ashford, I need to be honest with you about the prognosis."
"How bad?" Her voice was barely a whisper.
"Full recovery is unlikely. You’ll regain so function, certainly. But your hands will never be what they were before the injury. You’ll have chronic pain, limited mobility, significant scarring. The damage was too extensive, and....." He hesitated. ".....and you didn’t receive proper dical care imdiately. By the ti you arrived here, so of the damage had beco irreversible."
Victoria’s mind flashed to another mory.....one she’d almost forgotten in the haze of pain. After Marcus had broken her hands, after she’d been lying on the warehouse floor sobbing and barely conscious, soone had co.
Aria.
Aria had been there, her face pale and horrified, looking at Victoria’s destroyed hands with an expression of absolute terror. And despite everything....despite the rivalry, despite the hatred, despite the fact that Victoria had tried to destroy her reputation....Aria had helped her.
Had applied basic first aid with shaking hands. Had wrapped the broken bones as carefully as she could. Had elevated them, applied ice, done everything possible to minimize the damage until proper dical care could be obtained.
Victoria rembered Aria’s voice, shaky and terrified: "I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry you had to see this. That he did this."
And Victoria had looked at Aria through her pain and seen the truth: Aria was just as horrified by Damien’s brutality as Victoria was. Maybe even more so, because Aria was seeing for the first ti what the man she loved was truly capable of.
That had been the first ti Aria had seen Damien’s dark side. The monster behind the beautiful face. And the terror in Aria’s eyes had been almost as satisfying as the revenge itself would have been.
Almost.
"After the first aid was applied," Dr. Mitchell continued, not knowing the context, "you were transported here. But that was still many hours after the initial injury. Long enough for complications to set in."
"How did I get here?" Victoria asked. "To Australia?"
"You were brought to the hospital by ambulance from the airport. According to the intake records, you arrived unconscious on a private flight from New York. Soone had arranged everything....the flight, the hospital, paynt for all dical expenses. But they didn’t stay. Just had you transferred from the plane to the ambulance and disappeared."
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