Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 129

Chapter 129

Chapter 129

Rieck’s POV

Selene woke up the way guilty people do, all at once, with a breath she tried to swallow.

She couldn’t see me. The blindfold saw to that.

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But I saw her go still the moment my scent reached her, and I knew she understood exactly whose hands she had woken up in.

“Hello, Selene,” I said.

She turned her head towards my voice.

Her wrists were bound to the arms of the chair, not tight enough to hurt, because I don’t break my word even to people I despise.

My men had done it smoothly. Not a mark on her.

She was frightened and whole, which was already more than she had earned.

The warehouse smelled of old rain and rust and dust. And somewhere above us a loose panel ticked in the

wind.

One work light hung over her chair and left the rest of the room to the dark, and I stood at the edge of that dark where she couldn’t have found me even with her eyes uncovered.

“Where am I?” Her voice shook, then steadied. She was good. I would give her that much. “Rieck. What is this?”

“This is the part you didn’t believe would ever come.” I took a step closer. The cold came with me, the way it always did when I stopped holding it back, and the air around her chair dropped until I saw her skin prickle. “I warned you. In my office. Again through my lawyers. I told you to stay away from my wife. I told you to stop reaching for my family with those small grasping hands.”

“You can’t just take a person.”

“I told you what would happen if you pushed me too far.” I didn’t raise my voice. I never have to. “But you smiled at me, and you kept pushing. So here we are. This is where the pushing stops.”

“Rieck, listen to me.”

“You are going to take a long trip, Selene. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere with no phones and no cameras and no way to breathe my name into anyone’s ear ever again. You will be comfortable. You will be safe. And you will be gone.” I let it settle over her. “I tried to do this the kind way. Remember that, when the quiet gets long.”

For the first time in weeks I felt the weight come off my shoulders.

It was done.

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Chapter 129

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Whatever she believed she held over me couldn’t travel out of a room with no door she was allowed to open.

I had solved her the way I solved everything, by moving the problem somewhere it could never reach me.

But I was wrong about that. And I would learn how wrong in under a minute.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t beg.

That should have warned me.

Suddenly my phone rang.

The screen showed no number at all. Blocked.

I almost let it ring out. But then the old instinct, the one that had kept me breathing longer than most Alphas manage, told me to answer.

I didn’t speak. I never speak first to a voice I don’t know.

“Check your messages, Mr. Valerius.” The voice was flat, so I couldn’t tell man from woman.

A video had come in while the phone rang.

I opened it, and it was grainy, shot from above, from a camera I never knew existed. But I knew that staircase.

I knew the pale marble. I knew the woman falling down it, and I knew the man at the top with his hand still open from the push, and the man was me.

Younger. Out of control in the one way I had sworn for the rest of my life I would never be again.

I knew what came after that fall. What the fall had taken from her.

The thing neither of us ever said out loud, the thing I had paid a fortune to bury in the ground with every other part of myself I couldn’t look at.

Someone had filmed it. Someone had kept it. For years.

The flat voice returned. “Release her. Tonight. Unharmed, from wherever you have put her. If she’s not walking free by morning, every newsroom in the country opens their day with this. The great Rieck Valerius, and what he does to women who carry inconvenient things.” There was a pause. “Five minutes.”

The call ended.

Behind me, Selene laughed.

It started soft, then filled the whole cold room, a real laugh, delighted.

I crossed the floor in three strides and pulled the blindfold from her face, because I needed to see her. I needed to know what she knew.

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Chapter 129

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She blinked up into the work light, and the fear was just gone, as though it had never lived there at all. And maybe it never had.

“There he is,” she said.

“How much do you know?”

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Her smile spread slowly. Then she said the one word I had kept out of every room she had ever stood in.

She looked straight into my eyes, and she breathed it like a treasure she had been saving for years.

“Alpha.”

At that moment the warehouse went very quiet.

She knew. She had always known.

Someone had set her down inside my company, inside my wife’s trust, inside my path, and for weeks I had walked circles around her believing I was the one doing the hunting.

But I had been the prey the whole time.

“Let me go, Rieck,” she said sweetly. “Before your five minutes run out.”

I looked at her for a long moment.

Every part of me that was wolf wanted to end this the simple way, the way my grandfather would have ended it. But a dead Selene put that video on every screen in the country by breakfast.

A dead Selene took Aurelia from me as surely as a living one.

“Cut her loose,” I said to Tobias, and my voice came out like something dragged over stone. “Put her in a car. Give her whatever she asks for.”

Tobias didn’t question it. He never did.

Selene stood and rubbed her wrists and leaned close as she passed me, close enough that the words were only for me.

“You should ask yourself,” she whispered, “who taught me that word.”

Then she walked out into the dark on her own two feet, and there was nothing in the world I could do to stop

her.

Aurelia was awake when I got home.

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