Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Rieck’s POV

》7

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“The meeting. Tomorrow. One room. Your wife and me. No advisors. No husbands. No lawyers in the corner scribbling notes. Just the two of us and the contract.”

My jaw tightened.

“No.”

“Then there will be no deal, Mr. Valerius. And with respect, I am not a man who enjoys being asked twice,” he said before suddenly ending the call.

I stood very still in the middle of the living room and I listened to my own breathing and I thought about how many ways there were to kill a man with a mouth that ran like that.

Just then the bedroom door opened behind me and Aurelia walked out with the Kowalski file open in her hands and a pencil between her teeth. Her hair was up in a careless knot. She had taken off her dress and put on one of my shirts, the sleeves swallowing her wrists..

As she looked at me, she furrowed her brow and asked, “What?”

“Kowalski called.”

“And?”

“He wants to see you. Alone. Tomorrow.”

She lowered the file.

‘I can do it.”

“No.”

“Rieck.”

“No, Aurelia.”

She crossed the room anyway..

“Listen. I have been reading this for an hour. His margins are thin. His waterfront parcel has a drainage issue nobody on his board has caught yet. I can see three concessions you don’t need to make because he doesn’t know he needs them. I can close this. Please.”

I stared down at her.

She smelled of me and her own skin, warm and a little nervous.

“Please,” she said again.

1/6

16:59 Fri, Jul 31

Chapter 12

I didn’t know when I had become the kind of man who could be moved by please.

“Fine

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We were sitting in the back of the SUV across the street from Kowalski Tower at ten the next morning. She had put on a grey suit and pinned her hair back so tight it pulled her eyes a shade sharper. She looked nothing like the girl in the silk dress from last night.

She looked like a woman who could ruin someone.

But I hadn’t said that out loud.

“Twenty minutes,” I said instead. “That is all. You walk in, you shake his hand, you show him the drainage line, you get a signature or you get out. Ronan will be at the curb. Tobias is on the ninth floor in the coffee shop across the lobby. If you so much as blink wrong, he is up those stairs.”

“Rieck.

“If you are not out in twenty minutes, I am coming in.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I know.”

With that, she opened the door and slid out and she did not look back.

I watched her walk across the street in those heels and I gripped the armrest so hard I heard the leather creak.

Ronan started the clock on the dash.

Twenty minutes.

I watched it count down.

At fifteen I was fine. At twelve I was tapping my ring against the window. At ten I had my phone in my hand. At seven I was running through every exit on the Kowalski floor plan in my head. At five minutes left on the dash, I leaned forward.

“Ronan.”

“Boss.”

“If she is not out of that building in five minutes, the men go in and fetch her.”

“Understood.”

“And then we burn the building down.”

2/6

16:59 Fri, Jul 31

Chapter 12

:

70

55 vouchers

There was a small, startled breath in the front seat. Tobias, in my ear through the comm, said “Boss”, quietly.

“Did I stutter?”

“No, boss.”

“Good.”

I had been out of my mind to agree to this. I had handed my wife over to a stranger in a locked office on the word of a man who walked away from my dinner table and came back an hour later with a condition, and the condition had come through a mouth that had been whispered into, tonight, by a tawny-haired Alpha who wanted my territory and already has his eyes on her.

With two minutes left, my door was already open and my foot was on the pavement.

But then the revolving door of Kowalski Tower turned and Aurelia stepped out.

She was smiling.

Not the taught-in-a-dining-room smile she used at galas. A real one. Small and private and a little astonished at herself, like she had just passed a test.

Crossing the street, she slowly got into the car and placed the file on her lap.

“Well?” I said.

“Four hundred million over the asking price,” she whispered. “Signed. He also agreed to cover the drainage remediation out of his end. Shall I tell you the part where I made him throw in the naming rights to the south wing?”

I stared at her in shock.

Her smile faltered.

“Is that good?” she asked, suddenly unsure. “It’s good, right? I didn’t overplay it?”

I wanted to tell her that it was better than I could have done. But I didn’t.

“It is adequate,” I said instead.

My phone rang halfway across the bridge.

It was Hebvron.

“Dawson moved this morning,” my father said.

My shoulders went stiff.

“How?”

3/6

16:59 Fri, Jul 31

Chapter 12

70

55 vouchers

“He has filed emergency paternity paperwork on the Charlotte child. Expedited. He has a judge in his pocket and he has told the board that an heir will be on paper inside the week. If he closes that paperwork before your girl is pregnant, the bylaws go his way, not ours. Am I being clear?”

“Yes.”

“One week, Rieck.”

With that, the line went dead.

I set the phone face down on my thigh.

“Rieck?”

She was staring at me, the file forgotten on her lap.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“You look like someone died.”

“No one died.” I looked at her. At the victory still pink on her cheeks. “Drive,” I said to Ronan.

She opened her mouth but then closed it and went back to the file and did not ask again.

As soon as the elevator doors opened into the penthouse, she walked in first. She was already unbuttoning the suit jacket, already reaching up to pull the pin out of her hair.

“Stop.

She turned. The pin was halfway out.

“Take it off.”

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