Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 133

Chapter 133

Chapter 133

Aurelia’s POV

:

53

55 vouchers

I had been hiding in my own office for less than an hour, trying to make myself small behind a closed door, when Rieck walked in without knocking and shut it behind him.

One look at his face told me he hadn’t come to comfort me.

He didn’t sit. He stood on the other side of my desk with his hands pushed into his pockets, and the air in the room seemed to thin the way it always did when he was holding himself very still.

“That,” he said, “can’t happen again.”

I was ready for a great many things on the walk back from that meeting. But I wasn’t ready for that.

“Rieck, I…”

“You screamed at a member of staff in front of twelve people in a budget review.” His voice was low and even. “People who answer to you. People who will now spend the rest of the quarter wondering whether the woman. running the eastern build can keep her head when it counts.”

“She had her hand on your arm.” I said.

“And you let jealousy walk you into that room and humiliate yourself in front of your own team.” He shook his head, slow and disappointed. “This is not you. The woman I married sat in a room full of men who wanted her to fail and closed a one point four billion dollar deal without ever once raising her voice. Look at what you are turning into over nothing at all. You are losing yourself, Aurelia. One suspicion at a time. And I am standing here seeing it happen.”

“Rieck…”

“There’s nothing happening between me and Selene,” he went on. “There’s nothing there for you to find, no matter how hard you go looking for it. You are chasing shadows and calling them evidence.” He stopped with his hand on the door. “So stop chasing. Put that energy into our family instead. That’s the thing we agreed to build. That’s what actually matters.”

His words landed in the one place he couldn’t have known they would, on the thing my body might never be able to give him, the quiet grief the two of us carried between us and never once said out loud.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

I just sat there behind my desk, struck dumb, while my husband looked at me the way a man looks at a problem he has grown tired of solving.

Then he opened the door and walked out, and I didn’t get to say a single word.

That evening he came home early.

173

16:30 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 133

53

55 vouchers

I heard him move through the penthouse, and then he stopped in the doorway of the bedroom where I sat pretending to read, and for a long moment he said nothing at all.

“I spoke badly this morning,” he said and I looked up.

In all the strange months of this marriage, through every coldness and every locked door, I had never once heard Rieck Valerius apologize for anything.

“I was angry, and I put it on you, and that wasn’t fair.” He crossed the room and crouched down in front of me so that we were level, and his scent reached me, sandalwood and cold rain, and one of his hands rose to cup the side of my jaw the way it only ever did when he needed me to believe him. “There’s nothing between me and that woman. Nothing. I need you to hear me say it. I would never do that to you.”

And that was the part I couldn’t make sit right.

The Rieck I knew didn’t lose his temper in the morning and come home sweet by night.

He didn’t swing like that.

He was the most controlled man I had ever stood next to, and yet lately he moved through our life like someone carrying… a secret.

I wanted so badly to believe him, and that was the whole trap of it.

Every reasonable word out of his mouth sounded exactly like the truth. And every reasonable word left the same question sitting there untouched between us.

If there was nothing, then why was she still here? Why the broken promise? Why the reconsidering? Why any of it at all?

“Okay,” I said softly, and let him believe he had reached me.

I went to work the next morning with a plan, and the plan was a simple one.

Stay calm. Stay professional. Give no one in that building a single thing to whisper about ever again.

The plan lasted until nine fifteen.

That was the moment Selene walked in through the glass doors of the lobby, and every head on the floor turned to follow her across it.

Everything about her that morning had been cut and fitted to pull the eye and then hold it there, and it worked, on the men at the front desk, on the interns loitering by the elevators, on a dozen people who had no reason to stare and stared anyway.

She moved through all of it as though she could feel every single look landing on her skin and savoured the weight of every one.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself to keep walking and not look back.

2/3

16:30 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 133

I made it almost to my office door before I turned around.

នគ

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify