Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 126

Chapter 126

Chapter 126

Aurelia’s POV

I didn’t take off my coat when I got home.

គយ

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I stood in the middle of the penthouse and waited, because tonight I wasn’t going to let him talk me out of letting that bitch go.

The elevator opened just after nine.

I heard his shoes on the floor before I saw him. Then his scent reached me, sandalwood and cold rain, the smell that once made my knees weak and now only made my jaw tighten.

“You waited up,” Rieck said. He set his keys on the counter. His eyes moved over me once, the coat, the way I stood. He read the room before he read the person.

“We need to talk about Selene.”

Something in his face went still. Not surprised. Worried.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I would rather stand.”

He came closer anyway. He stopped an arm away, close enough that I had to lift my chin to hold his eyes. “Tell me what happened.”

“You already know what happened.” I kept my voice level. I was proud of that. “She walked into my office today. Mine. She told me I was insecure. She smiled like she owned the floor. And she told me to ask my own husband about the history between the two of you.”

He didn’t blink. “And what did you say?”

“I said nothing, because I’m not going to fight with the marketing girl in front of the staff.” I took a breath. “But I’m done, Rieck. I’m done being warned and patient and understanding. She insulted your wife inside your own building. If our marriage means anything to you, there’s only one answer to that.”

“Aurelia.”

“I don’t want an apology from her.” My hands were steady at my sides. “I don’t want you to have a talk with her, or move her to another floor, or give her a final warning. I want her gone. Relieved of her duties. Out of the building by the time I walk in on Monday.”

At that moment, the room felt colder. And for a moment I thought he would tell me no.

Then he let out a slow breath and the cold pulled back into him.

Ill handle it,” he said. “Personally. I give you my word.”

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Chapter 126

“When?”

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“Soon. I just need a little time to do it cleanly. She has contracts, notice terms. If I throw her out wrong, she can make it messy for the company, and the company is already bleeding.” He tilted his head. “You know that better than anyone. You built half the hiring yourself.”

It was reasonable. That was the problem. Everything he said was always so reasonable.

“A little time,” I repeated.

“A little time.”

I nodded once and walked past him towards our room, and I told myself that the tightness in my chest was anger and only anger.

But I should have known better than to take an Alpha at his word.

He didn’t handle it.

One day passed. Then two. Then it was the middle of the week and Selene still came through the glass doors every morning at eight, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, heels clicking across the lobby like she had signed the lease on the whole building.

I looked for the signs of a woman about to lose her job. But there were none.

She laughed with the design team. She sat in on the Thursday budget meeting and spoke first, before I could, as if the seat were hers.

When she passed my office she slowed, just a little, just long enough to look in at me and let a small smile touch her mouth before she moved on.

And Rieck… he said nothing about it.

When I asked, the first time, he said it was in progress. When I asked the second time, he said these things took time. By the third time I stopped asking, because I didn’t like the way my voice sounded, weak and pleading, like the woman I used to be.

I told myself there was a business reason. Contracts. Notice terms. The bleeding company.

I lined the reasons up and I looked at them, and they were good reasons, but they still didn’t explain the thing I couldn’t stop seeing.

If Rieck wanted someone gone, they were gone. I had seen him end men who crossed him with a single phone call and no second thought.

He didn’t agonize. He didn’t wait for the clean moment. He just did it.

He wasn’t waiting because it was hard.

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Chapter 126

He was waiting because some part of him didn’t want to do it.

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The thought came at night, in the dark, when he was asleep beside me with one heavy arm across my waist.

I was laying under the weight of that arm and I let myself think the thing I had been pushing down for days.

“Whatever was between them never really ended.”

I didn’t know if it was old love or old guilt or something with a name I hadn’t heard yet.

I just knew that a man who would burn the world for me couldn’t seem to fire one marketing manager, and there was only one kind of reason strong enough to freeze a man like Rieck in place.

The kind you don’t tell your wife.

I moved his arm off me, gently, so I wouldn’t wake him, and I lay on the far edge of the bed with my back to his. And I stared at the wall until the sky went grey.

By morning I wasn’t sad anymore.

I was done.

I didn’t knock.

His office door was heavy and it swung wide under my hand, and Elara half rose from her desk in the outer room with a file pressed to her chest. I walked past her before she could say a word.

Rieck looked up from his screen. He wasn’t surprised to see me. He was never surprised to see me. But his eyes flicked once to the door I had left open, and then back, and I understood that he already knew why I had

come.

“Close it,” he said.

“No.” I stopped in front of his desk. “Everyone can hear this if they want to. Why is Selene still working here?”

He set his pen down. Slow. Controlled. “Sit down, Aurelia.”

“Answer the question.”

“I told you I was handling it.”

“That was five days ago.” I planted both hands on the edge of his desk and leaned in. “Five days, Rieck. You once had a supplier’s contract cancelled and his warehouse emptied before lunch because he raised your steel price. But a woman who insulted your wife in your own building gets a week and counting.”

His hands went flat on the desk and when he spoke his voice was low, and there was a rough edge under it that wasn’t quite human.

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