Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 130

Chapter 130

Chapter 130

Aurelia’s POV

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I walked into the building that morning feeling happier than I had in weeks, because the paperwork had finally gone through and the woman who had spent so long poisoning my marriage was supposed to be gone for good.

The lobby was bright with early sun, and the whole floor had that morning buzz I had always loved.

I said good morning to the front desk, stepped into the elevator with my warm coffee in my hand, and let myself believe, for about ninety more seconds, that things were finally going to be simple.

Then the doors opened on the marketing floor, and I saw her.

Selene was standing by the long window near the design pods, laughing at something one of the junior staff had said, a cup in her hand and her coat still draped over her arm, as comfortable as a woman who had never been away for a single day.

She looked up, caught my eye across the room, and didn’t so much as flinch.

For a moment I couldn’t make my body move, and I stood half in and half out of the elevator until the doors started to close on me and I had to put out a hand to stop them.

She was supposed to be gone. I had been told, in writing, that her resignation was final, that the whole thing had been handled quietly the way these things always were, and I had thanked my husband for it and slept, for the first time in a week, without that woman’s smile haunting me.

Yet here she was in the daylight, holding a coffee and being greeted by people who had no idea anything had ever been wrong.

“Was it ever real,” I thought, watching her tip her head back and laugh. “Did he ever mean to let her go at all?”

I didn’t go to my office.

Turning on my heel, I walked straight for the one door in this building that owed me an answer.

Elara tried to stop me at the outer desk with something about a call he was on, but I went past her and pushed the door open anyway, and Rieck looked up from behind his desk without the smallest flicker of surprise, because of course he had known I would come.

“Selene is downstairs,” I said. “Drinking coffee. Laughing with the interns. Wearing her coat as though she owns the place.” I kept my voice as level as I was able to. “You told me her resignation was final. You told me it was finished. So I would very much like you to explain why she’s on the marketing floor this morning as if none of it ever happened.”

He set his pen down and looked at me for a long moment before he spoke.

I reconsidered,” he said.

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16:29 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 130

I waited for the rest of it, but there was no rest of it coming.

“You reconsidered?” I repeated.

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“I looked at the situation again and decided it was better for the company to keep her on. She’s good at what she does, and letting her go now would cost us more than she’s worth to lose.” He held my eyes, steady and unreadable as ever. “She stays.”

This was the man who had promised me, with my own hand resting against his face, that he would handle it himself.

This was the man who had come home the night before looking as though he had clawed his way out of his own grave, who had lied to me about a bad day at work and then held me in the dark like something was trying to pull me out of his arms.

And now he sat here and told me, in that flat and final voice of his, that the woman who had humiliated me in my own office was staying, and that I ought to just live with it.

“After everything,” I said quietly. “After I asked you for one single thing, you changed your mind.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

For just a breath something crossed his face, there and then gone before I could catch hold of it, and afterwards it was locked away again behind that door of his I had never once been allowed through.

“Because I decided,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.”

It wasn’t all I needed to know. It wasn’t anywhere close.

But I had learned, over the long months of this marriage, that when Rieck shut a door like that there was no key in the world that would move it, and that beating on it only left me with torn hands and nothing else.

So I turned and walked out of his office, and I made very sure he didn’t get to see my face while I did it.

I held myself together for most of the day, which I was quietly proud of, right up until the hallway outside the east conference room in the late afternoon, when the last person on earth I wanted to see stepped neatly into my path.

It was Selene, alone this time, with no interns and no audience anywhere in sight, and the moment her eyes found mine her mouth curved into a smile.

She stopped just close enough that I caught her perfume, something cool and expensive and nothing at all like the sweetness she poured over everyone else.

“Aurelia,” she said, as pleasant as a spring morning. “You look tired. Long day?”

“Excuse me.” I moved to step around her.

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16:29 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 130

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