"Why are you making my daughter do this work?!" Richard's voice thundered through the marble foyer, bouncing off the high ceilings, so loud that a maid two floors up dropped a stack of towels in shock.
Victoria's composure finally cracked entirely. "Richard, please, you're overreacting — it was a small chore, children need structure, you're never here to see how she really behaves—"
"Behaves?" Richard's laugh was sharp and humorless. "She's twelve years old. She has bruises on her forehead. Her hands are bleeding." He gestured toward Emily, who stood pressed against his side now, gripping his suit jacket like a lifeline. "You told me every single night that she was fine. You looked me in the eye — on video calls — and told me she was doing homework, sleeping well, happy. You lied to me for months."
"I did it for us," Victoria said, her voice rising, desperation breaking through the elegance. "For our family, so that everything could be perfect, so you wouldn't have to worry—"
"Don't you dare say 'our family,'" Richard said, his voice dropping to something far more dangerous than shouting. "You are not her mother. You never were. You were a woman I trusted with my daughter's safety, and you used that trust to torture a child in her own home."
Emily flinched at the word "torture," and Richard immediately softened his tone, crouching down to her level. "It's okay, baby. I'm here now. Nobody is ever going to hurt you again. I promise you that."
He stood back up, and his eyes returned to Victoria, colder now, more controlled — the expression of a man calculating his next move rather than simply reacting in anger. "I'm calling my security team. I want every camera in this house pulled — the ones covering the staircase, the kitchen, Emily's bedroom hallway. I want to know exactly how long this has been happening, and I want to know if you ever laid a hand on her directly."
Victoria's face went pale. She hadn't accounted for the cameras Richard had installed years ago, after a break-in scare, cameras she'd forgotten still ran on a separate system she didn't control.
"You can't prove anything," she said, though her voice wavered.
"I don't need to prove anything to you," Richard said quietly. "I need to prove it to the people who are about to remove you from this house — permanently."
He pulled out his phone and dialed a number Emily had never heard him use before — his head of household security, and right after, his lawyer.