Page 59 of Hooked On Victor
Nikolai stood near the window, his lean frame framed by the lace curtain’s delicate shadows. His arms were folded across his chest, coat unbuttoned, the shoulder rig beneath just visible when he shifted. He didn’t fidget. He didn’t sigh. He watched the hills the way a hawk watched for movement—every leaf, every shiver in the grass cataloged in that unblinking gaze.
Rose sat at Victor’s side, one knee drawn up, her hand resting on the table just shy of his. She didn’t need to touch him. Being there was enough. The anchor he kept returning to. The witness to every step that had brought them to this quiet room with its uneven floorboards and its crown of sunlit dust motes.
Victor’s voice broke the hush at last, low but steady.
“What are we calling this?” He tapped the headline draft on the screen.
Rose tilted her head, studying the bold letters. She smiled faintly, a dry humor in her eyes that she knew he needed.
“Not ‘The Return of the Tsar.’”
Nikolai’s soft snort was edged with genuine amusement.
“God, no,” he said without turning from the window.
Victor considered the empty space on the screen, the cursor blinking like a heartbeat.
Then his mouth curved just slightly.
“The Echo Ledger,” he said.
Nikolai’s brow lifted in a rare expression of approval.
“Not bad.”
Victor nodded, the decision final in the way he pressed the keys.
“We publish selected letters,” he said, voice calm. “The ledger of betrayals that shaped the fall. Redacted names. Dates. Enough to remind the world that history isn’t just myth and marble. It’s men. And consequences.”
“And the rest?” Rose asked, her voice softer, as though afraid to break this fragile moment of certainty.
Victor glanced at the small black flash drive beside the journal. Its plastic shell looked innocuous. Ordinary. But they all knew it could burn the world if mishandled.
“It stays in the vault,” he said firmly. “Locked. Monitored.”
Nikolai finally turned from the window, dark eyes measuring.
“You’re not tempted?” he asked quietly. “To claim it all?”
Victor’s jaw worked once, twice.
“I’m more tempted,” he said slowly, “to let it breathe. To let it stop haunting me.”
The afternoon passed in a steady rhythm that felt almost normal.
Nikolai slipped away after lunch, shrugging into his coat with the quiet efficiency of a man who’d never once needed to explain where he was going. He left no instructions, no reassurances. Just a nod to Victor and a last look at Rose as if acknowledging the unspoken understanding between them.
Outside in the courtyard, he met a courier with an unremarkable face and an encrypted satchel. The documents would begin their journey tonight—scattered across trusted archives, each piece logged under anonymous metadata.
Rose stayed behind, curled in the window seat with the last of the letters spread across her lap. She moved slowly, scanning, translating, cataloging. Every so often she’d murmur a line aloud, her voice so soft it seemed meant more for the walls than for Victor.
Victor himself spent an hour pacing the terrace outside, hands in his pockets, the cold wind combing through his hair. The viewstretched wide in all directions—rolling green hills stippled with dark cypress, a sky bruised with the promise of rain.
He tried to picture what it meant to outlive your own legacy. To stand on the bones of a dynasty that had birthed you—and nearly swallowed you whole.
He was thinking of Tatiana. Of a woman he’d never met whose courage had given him this second life.
He was thinking of his mother, whose face he barely remembered.
