Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 136

Chp 136; No Other Choice.

The men she met didn’t give their names, and Charlotte didn’t ask for them.

That was how these things were done, she supposed, though she had never once in her life imagined she would be the woman sitting across the table learning how.

The place was a shuttered garage on the wrong side of the river, cold and smelling of oil and rust, the kind of place a woman like her had no business standing in her good wool coat.

There were three of them. The one who mattered sat across a scarred metal table with his hands folded, calm and unbothered, as though she had come to order curtains for a spare room.

She slid the envelope across first. It was heavy with more money than most people saw in a year, and he didn’t open it, only rested one broad hand on top of it and waited for the rest.

Then the picture. A man’s face, smiling, caught on some ordinary afternoon that already felt like it belonged to another life entirely.

Her hand shook when she let go of it, and she hated that it shook, so she folded her fingers together in her lap where the men couldn’t see them.

“His name, his address, where he buys his coffee, it’s all written down in there,” she said, and her voice came out steadier than the rest of her. “I need it done soon, and I need it done quietly.” She made herself hold the man’s flat, patient gaze. “It has to look like he did it to himself. No questions and no investigation. Only a sad man who couldn’t carry on. That is the only thing anyone can ever be allowed to think.”

The man studied the picture for a moment. Then he slid it into his jacket, and he nodded once, and that was the whole of it.

No handshake, no promises, nothing said aloud. Only a single nod, and a life traded away for the weight of an envelope.

Charlotte walked back out into the hot afternoon on legs that didn’t quite feel like hers. She told herself, the entire way to the car, that there had been no other choice left to her.

He would never have stopped. He would have taken everything she had, her home and her name and her son’s whole future. and torn it all down just to punish her for choosing another life.

She had begged him. She had paid him. She had blocked every door she could find. So this was the last door, and a woman did what a woman had to do to keep her child safe.

The call came a little after four, while she sat alone in the quiet of the apartment with a cup of tea gone cold between her

hands.

She knew before she answered. She had been waiting for it the way a person waits for a storm they have already seen gather on the horizon.

“It is done, the voice said, and nothing more, and the line went dead in her ear

A moment later the phone buzzed again, and a video was waiting inside a message from a number that wouldn’t exist by morning.

Charlotte didn’t want to watch it. But she made herself watch it anyway, because some cold part of her needed to know that the money had bought exactly what it had been meant to buy.

It was short, and she didn’t let it run to the end. She saw enough to know that it was real, that it was done, that the man in the picture would never be calling her from any new number again.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Then she turned the screen face down on the cushion beside her and pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth

And then, without asking her permission, it came.

Not relief. She had told herself to expect relief. What overwhelmed her instead was grief, sudden and drowning, the kind she hadn’t let herself feel in years.

Her other hand drifted to the curve of her belly the way it always did now, and she felt the small life turn under her palm. and something inside her broke.

Whatever he had become there at the end, whatever ugly things he had threatened, there had once been a time when Adrian was the only person alive who had ever loved her and wanted nothing back for it.

And now, because of her, because of one small nod across a metal table, he was gone. And the child under her hand would grow up and never know a single thing about the man who had wanted him so fiercely that he couldn’t make himself let go

“I did this,” she thought. “Whatever story I tell the world, I’ll always know. I did this.”

She didn’t hear Dawson come in.

One moment she was alone with the wreckage of her own face, and the next his shadow fell across the couch, and she looked up to find him in the doorway with his coat still on, staring at her.

He didn’t move toward her. He only stared, and she felt the staring land on her skin like a hand closing at her throat.

“You’ve been crying,” Dawson said. His voice was sweet, and that was the part that frightened her, because Dawson was never sweet unless he was hunting something. “What’s wrong?”

Charlotte wiped her face quickly and made herself smile, the bright and lovely smile that had walked her out of a hundred difficult rooms.

“It’s nothing,” she whispered. “Hormones. I watched something sad on my phone and it set me right off, that’s all. You know how I get these days.” She laughed, and the laugh was very nearly perfect. “Look at the state of me. A mess over nothing at

all.

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