Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 104

Chapter 104

Chapter 104

Aurelia’s POV

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54

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I sat at the kitchen table long after Rieck fell asleep, sipping slowly at a glass of water, my body still hurting in places I didn’t want to think too closely about.

Marta appeared quietly from the hallway, setting a small plate of crackers beside my glass. “Are you hungry, Mrs. Valerius?”

“No. Thank you.”

She lingered for a moment, studying my face with the patience of a woman who had worked in this house long enough to read the things people tried not to say. Nine years in this household had taught her to notice everything and comment on very little. “Would you like to talk about it?”

“It’s nothing important.”

She didn’t push, just nodded and returned to whatever quiet task had brought her through the kitchen, leaving me alone with the glass and my own tangled thoughts.

On the other hand, my mind kept circling back to the bedroom, to the way Rieck had gripped me too hard and moved too rough.

He had hurt me.

I had begged him to slow down, my voice breaking somewhere near the end, and for one terrible moment he hadn’t seemed to hear me at all, lost somewhere far beyond himself, somewhere I couldn’t reach no matter how loud I called his name.

He had stopped eventually, with his whole body shaking and horror flooding his face the second he realized what he had done.

He had apologized more in those few minutes than in the entire time I had known him, his hands suddenly weak, checking every inch of skin he had bruised, murmuring my name over and over like a man trying to convince himself he hadn’t just become someone he didn’t recognize.

Something had broken loose in him tonight, something his father’s visit had clearly cracked open. And I intended to find out exactly what Hebvron had said to leave him in such a state.

I found him asleep when I finally made my way to the bedroom, meaning to wake him up and finish the conversation properly.

He looked younger somehow in sleep, the hard lines of his face softened, his dark hair falling loose across his forehead.

Even now, even after everything, I couldn’t deny how handsome he was, how easily my anger towards him kept dissolving into something far more complicated.

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16:24 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 104

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54

I sat carefully on the edge of the bed, studying him for a long moment, wondering how a man capable of such gentleness could also lose himself so completely to whatever his father had said, the two versions of him sitting so strangely close together under the same skin.

Just then his phone buzzed once against the nightstand and the screen lit up bright in the dark room.

I shouldn’t have looked. I told myself that even as I reached for it.

But some old instinct pulled my hand forward before my conscience could stop it.

It was a text from Hebvron, “You are distracted, Rieck. Dawson’s numbers climbed again today while you played house. A real Alpha doesn’t lose his empire chasing a woman’s approval. Choose wisely before there is nothing left to choose.”

My stomach turned cold reading it.

There it was, the reason for tonight’s rage, laid bare in a single cruel message.

Hebvron had been pressing on Rieck for days, chipping away at him in small, poisonous doses, and I had mistaken the damage for something else entirely, some private battle Rieck was fighting alone that had nothing to do with me.

I thought of the shirt in the bathroom trash, the silence about his work, the strange days he refused to leave my side, the way he had checked locks he never used to check. How much of it traced back to messages exactly like this one, sent late at night when Hebvron knew his son’s guard would be lowest, when exhaustion made even the strongest man vulnerable to doubt.

As I set the phone back down exactly where I found it, my hands trembled slightly.

Rieck wasn’t the villain in tonight’s story. He was just the latest casualty of a man who had never once cared what he broke to get what he wanted.

By evening I had made up my mind.

I found Hebvron in his study, his cane resting against the desk, a glass of dark liquor untouched beside him, the smell of cigar smoke thick enough to catch in my throat the moment I stepped through the door.

He didn’t look up right away, taking his time finishing whatever line he was reading before finally acknowledging my presence, a small power play I recognized from every conversation I had ever had with this man, the same slow contempt he used on everyone who dared interrupt him.

“I think you should leave Rieck alone,” I said, standing boldly in the doorway, refusing to let my voice shake.

He looked up, unbothered, almost amused, setting down whatever paperwork he had been reading. “I think you should do your duty as a wife.”

“Excuse me?” My grip tightened on the doorframe.

“Look at him, Aurelia. He is weak now, distracted, careless with his own company’s future while Dawson’s

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16:24 Mon, Aug 3

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