Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 132

Chapter 132

Chapter 132

Aurelia’s POV

I had learned, over the years, how to swallow things down into a place where no one could we them

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That week I found out there was a limit to how much a person could keep swallowing before it all started to come back up

I thought I was hiding it well. I moved through the penthouse that evening the way I always did, hanging, up my coat, pouring myself a glass of water, answering Marta’s small questions about dinner in a voice I kept deliberately low.

The white leather and the tall dark glass gave nothing back. And I told myself my face was giving nothing

back either

But I was wrong about that

Marta had been with this household for nine years, Jong, before I ever walked into it, and she had a way of looking at a person that slipped straight past whatever they were pretending to be

She set a cup of tea down beside me without my asking for it, and then she didn’t leave, which was how I knew I had already lost.

“You are carrying something heavy tonight, Mrs. Valerius,” she said gently. Her hands, worn soft by a lifetime of work, folded in front of her apron. “You have been carrying it for days now. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” The answer came out too quickly, the way it always does when it’s a lie. I tried to soften it with a smile that cost me more than it should have. “Tin just tired, Marta. It has been a long week at the office. That’s all it is.”

She didn’t believe me. And I saw her decide not to say so.

“Of course,” she said instead. “You work too hard.” But she lingered a moment longer, her kind eyes moving over my face, and I felt the sudden and dangerous urge to put my head down on the counter and tell her all of it.

About Selene About the promise my husband had made me and then quietly broken. About the smile in the corridor and the words that wouldn’t leave me alone no matter how I tried to outrun them.

Marta already knew more of my secrets than anyone alive, and she had kept every one of them without ever once being asked to. And somehow that made it harder rather than easier.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her anything.

So I just picked up the tea and thanked her and carried my heavy thing off to bed by myself.

By the next afternoon I had very nearly convinced myself that I was overreacting to all of it.

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Chapter 132

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Then Selene walked into the glass conference room with a file pressed to her chest, and every bit of that hard- won calm went straight out of me.

She didn’t need to be in that meeting. It was a budget review for the eastern build, my project, a room full of people from finance and site management, and marketing had no business being anywhere near it.

Yet there she was, slipping into the room where my husband sat at the head of the long table, and there she stayed.

I stared at her through the glass wall from my desk, telling myself to look away and failing at it every single

time.

Five minutes went by. Then ten. The file she had carried in with her sat closed and untouched on the table, and still she didn’t leave.

She leaned towards him whenever she spoke. She laughed at something and raised one hand to her hair.

And Rieck, my cold and unreadable husband, didn’t move her along the way he moved everyone along the moment they wasted a second of his time.

That was the thing that undid me.

Not her laugh, not the hand in her hair, but his patience.

I had seen Rieck cut off men twice her importance with a single flat look. He had no patience for anyone. He had made an art out of having none. And yet for her he just sat there and let her stay, minute after minute, and every one of those minutes told me something I didn’t want to know.

I twisted the ring on my finger until the skin under it went raw.

“Look away,” I told myself. “Stand up, walk to the break room, do anything at all but sit here and watch this happen.”

But the feeling had already started to build in me, low and awful, the same feeling that had been growing for days with nowhere in the world to go.

So without thinking, I stood up.

I left my work open on the screen and my coffee going cold beside it, and I walked towards that conference room with my heart slamming against my ribs and no plan at all in my head.

I didn’t knock.

I pushed the door open hard enough that it swung wide and struck the wall, and a dozen faces turned up towards me around the long table.

I didn’t see a single one of them. I saw only the two people at the front of the room.

Selene was standing beside Rieck’s chair. Close. Far too close.

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Chapter 132

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And her hand, her pale and manicured hand, was resting on my husband’s arm as though it had every right in the world to be there, as though she had set it there a hundred quiet times before.

At that moment, the room went strange and sharp around its edges, every sound falling away until all I could hear was the rush of my own blood, and the cold that always rolled off Rieck, and his eyes came up to mine and went pale and strange in that way I still didn’t have a name for.

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