Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 128

Chapter 128

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Chapter 128

The report landed on Dawson’s desk at four in the afternoon, and by the second page he had stopped breathing.

There was a second name.

He read it twice, because a man in his position didn’t get to be wrong about things like this.

Scotch first. He always thought better with a glass in his hand.

He poured two fingers, no ice, and let the bite of it settle on his tongue while he read the page a third time.

Two hundred thousand dollars. He knew that number now the way he knew his own signature. He had handed it to Charlotte himself, in cash and in sympathy, for a mother she claimed was fading away in some quiet clinic upstate.

But there was no clinic and there was no dying mother.

He had known that much for two weeks.

What he hadn’t known was where the money actually went.

And now he knew.

The first name he had already dug up on his own. Marcus Ealing. A photographer, of all the small and grubby things. A man who had been taking pictures of Charlotte in poses that a pregnant woman didn’t usually strike for the person hanging her curtains.

Marcus had his hand out, and Charlotte had been quietly filling it.

Dawson had almost made his peace with that. One man. One ugly little secret. People were weak. He could

work with weak.

But the money hadn’t stopped at Marcus.

It had moved again, through two accounts and a company with a name built to look boring, and it had come to rest with a man called Adrian Cole.

Dawson had never heard the name. His investigator had.

Adrian Cole, thirty-four, no honest job worth printing, and here was the part that turned the scotch sour in his mouth.

Adrian Cole had once dated Charlotte. Years back, before Dawson, when she was just another lovely girl in the city with expensive taste and an empty purse.

One old lover taking her money was a coincidence.

But two old lovers taking her money was a plan.

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Chapter 128

her head. “Why? Is something wrong?”

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Under the lilies, her scent had sharpened. Sour at the edges. His old blood knew it for what it was even as his face gave away nothing.

“No,” Dawson said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Then come here.” She patted the cushion. “You worry me when you get quiet like this. It isn’t good for the baby when I’m upset. You know that.”

There it was. The baby. She reached for it every time she felt something was wrong, and held it up between them like something he wasn’t allowed to look past.

‘She’s very, very good at this.”

He had married a woman once who couldn’t lie to save her life. He had thrown that woman away like something that had gone stale in the fridge. And he had replaced her with this.

A liar so smart she made him feel, for one cold second, almost impressed.

“Of course.” Dawson said, and made himself smile, and went to sit beside her.

He let her fuss with his collar and press her lily-heavy body against his side and talk about nursery colours, and he felt nothing at all except the slow, patient work of a mind deciding how a person would be taken apart.

He waited until she was asleep.

Then he went down to his study, closed the door, and lit a cigarette by the window with the city spread out below him.

He called the investigator on the private line.

“You saw the report,” the man said.

“Adrian Cole,” Dawson answered. “I want him.”

“You want us to bring him in?”

“No.” Dawson drew on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. “I want to know him. Everything. Where he sleeps. Where he eats. Who he calls at midnight and who he owes and what he is afraid of. I want a man on him from the moment he opens his eyes until the moment he shuts them.”

“And if he meets Charlotte?”

Dawson’s jaw went tight. Somewhere low in his chest, that old thing he didn’t name stirred again, cold and steady.

“If he so much as breathes the same air as Charlotte,” he said, “I want it on film. Every look. Every word. I want proof I can hold in my hand, not a feeling. A man doesn’t tear his own house down on a feeling.”

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