Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Aurelia’s POV

I didn’t go to the shower.

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I walked past him into the bedroom, my head held high, because my knees were about to give out and I wouldn’t let him see it. As soon as I made it to the bed, I sat on the edge and lay back against the pillows and just stared at the ceiling.

My body was shaking. My skin tingled where his mouth had been, and cold everywhere else, and there was a wet pain between my thighs that was half his and half mine and I didn’t know which part hurt more.

“Why are you this hard on me, Rieck?” I suddenly whispered.

I had enjoyed it. I wouldn’t lie to myself and pretend I hadn’t. My body had opened for him against the glass like it had been waiting for his hand all day. But he had been… rough.

“This is the price,” I thought to myself. “This is what you signed up for. A man to use you. A son to destroy Dawson. You don’t get to want softness on top of revenge.”

Just then I heard the bathroom door open. Then the sound of water running. Then silence.

And then, I heard him.

He walked into the bedroom in black sweatpants, still damp at the hairline, a white towel slung over one shoulder. He stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at me the way a man looks at a receipt he isn’t sure he should keep.

“Get up,” he said.

“I am tired.”

His gaze dropped to my hands. Still trembling.

“You’re shaking”

“I am cold.”

“You aren’t cold.”

I pushed myself up anyway, spine stiff

What do you want, Rieck?”

His jaw flexed once.

“You should be pregnant by now.”

“What?”

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Chapter 13

“You heard me.”

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He was looking at me with his arms crossed, his expression blank, as if he had just said the weather was

turning.

“Rieck.”

“It is a reasonable expectation. We have had sex four times. You are not on anything. I am not on anything. By now a small percentage tells us where we stand. So. Are you, or are you not?”

My throat tightened.

I’m not a spreadsheet.”

“No. You’re a variable I don’t like not understanding.”

My throat tightened. “I don’t know.”

He held my eyes a second longer-searching, calculating-then turned and left

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The next day, I was in the bathroom, sitting on the cold toilet seat with my knees pressed together and the little pink and white box shaking in my hand.

I had bought them in a drugstore off Fifth Avenue two weeks after the wedding, tucked them in the back of the vanity behind the tampons, and told myself I was just being… prepared. Told myself I wouldn’t need

them.

But I had needed them.

I peeled the wrapper and read the instructions I already knew by heart. Then I did the thing I had done in secret more times in the Dawson years than I wanted to count.

Placing the stick face down on the marble, I closed my eyes and whispered, “Please.”

I waited for three minutes, counting slowly to one hundred and eighty in my head without cheating. And then I turned the stick over.

There was one line.

Just one.

The bathroom tilted at that moment. My hand went to my mouth and I pressed it there hard, because if I didn’t, a sound was going to come out of me that would fill the whole penthouse.

Four times. Unprotected. Two years of pills. Two years of Dawson’s sad doctor. Two years of unlikely. And now a cold Alpha who could bed me against a window and I still couldn’t do the one thing a wife was supposed to do.

Maybe Dawson was right about me.

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Chapter 13

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Maybe I was broken. Maybe I had always been broken. Maybe that was why he had gone to Charlotte, because Charlotte’s body knew the trick my body could not remember. Maybe that was why Rieck would not look at me when he took me. Maybe that was why he would not let me touch his face, because some part of him already knew I was a dead end, and a man does not let a dead end touch his face.

I wrapped the stick in tissue. I buried it at the bottom of the bin under cotton pads and old wrappers. I washed my hands twice.

Then I looked at the woman in the mirror.

Red eyes. Bitten lip. A small pink mark on her throat where he had used his teeth.

“Useless,” she whispered back.

DOGDDUC0300

The rest of the day went by in a blur.

I didn’t remember eating. I remember Elara came up with a garment bag from the boutique and I nodded at whatever she said. I remember the light in the penthouse turning gold, then grey, then blue. I remember lying on the couch with a throw over my knees and the Kowalski file open on my lap that I didn’t read one word of.

Rieck came home at eight.

I heard the elevator. I heard the thud of his briefcase on the console. I heard his footsteps on the rug.

He stopped in front of the couch. But I didn’t look up.

And he didn’t ask if I was sick. He didn’t ask if I was sad. He didn’t ask if I had taken a test, or if the test had been cruel to me, or if he could sit down beside me and be the one human in this penthouse I was allowed to lean on.

He just looked at me for one long second, and I felt him decide something. Some small, bored decision, the kind a man makes when he has remembered that women are moody creatures and have cycles and do not need to be understood, only endured.

“Maybe she is pregnant already,” I imagined him thinking. “Maybe this is hormones.”

He walked past me into the bedroom without saying a word and shut the door.

I stared at the spot he had stood in. But I didn’t cry.

Crying was for girls who still thought tears fixed things.

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At night, I didn’t sleep.

I lay on my side of the bed with my back to him and listened to his breathing behind me and counted his exhales. They were slow and even. He slept like a man who had no account to settle. I wanted to shake him

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Chapter 13

awake and scream into his face.

But I didn’t.

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In the morning I got up before him, or I thought I did. The kitchen was empty so I made tea and toast. But after taking a bite, my stomach twisted.

The second bite went down wrong.

I quickly stood up. The chair scraped. The toast fell. I made it to the kitchen sink on legs that did not feel like mine and I threw up until there was nothing left to come up, and then I threw up again anyway.

I gripped the edge of the sink. Sweat prickled along my hairline. My mouth tasted of bile and tea and something… metallic.

Running the water, I rinsed my mouth then pressed a damp paper towel to the back of my neck.

“Aurelia.”

I immediately turned.

He was standing in the archway between the kitchen and the hallway, dressed for work in a charcoal suit, his tie loose around his collar. He hadn’t come from the elevator. He had come from the other side of the penthouse. His study.

He had been home the whole time and he had heard.

His eyes were not on my face. They were on the sink. On my mouth. On the hand I had pressed to my stomach without realizing.

When I straightened, he handed me a towel. Not gently. Not roughly. Just… there.

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