Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 137

Chp 137: Working Late

Aurelia’s POV

The floor had almost emptied when I stopped in Rieck’s doorway and found him still behind his desk, jacket off, sleeves shoved back.

“It’s after seven,” I said. “Come home.”

I can’t. Not yet.” He didn’t look up from the screen. “The Prentice contracts need signing and the eastern figures need to be clean before morning.”

Then I’ll stay.”

That got his eyes. “No.”

“Rieck.”

There’s nothing to stay for. Aurelia.” Even, patient, the voice that never handed me anything. “The floor is empty. Everyone has gone.”

“Everyone?” I didn’t have to say her name. He knew.

He set down the pen. “Selene badged out at five. I saw her go myself.” He looked at me, steady and unreadable. “”You really don’t have to stand guard over me. Go home. Eat. I’ll be two hours behind you.”

“It’s not you I don’t trust,” I spat. It was the closest I’d come to the truth in weeks. “It’s her. She wants something, and it isn’t a paycheck. Everyone can see it but you.”

“I see more than you think.” His jaw tightened. “Go home, Aurelia.”

“That’s not a no.”

“Go home.”

I wanted to argue. But I already knew how it would sound.

The jealous wife who couldn’t let her husband work late without a minder.

“Two hours,” I said.

“Two hours.”

I kissed him because it was easier than saying the rest, and I left him there with his contracts.

I had been home barely an hour when the buzzer went, and I opened the door to the last man I expected.

Hebvron.

He was standing in the hall with both hands folded over the silver head of his cane, and his scent came in ahead of him, cigar smoke and old leather.

“Aurelia.” The smile that never reached anything. “I had hoped to find my son at home.”

“He’s at the office. Working late. The Prentice contracts.”

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“At this hour.” Not a question. He lowered himself into the white chair, laid the cane across his knees, and read my face the way he read everything. “My son has signed a thousand contracts in his life. I have never once known him to stay past dark for a single one.”

There’s a lot going on right now.”

“So it would seem.” His pale eyes didn’t move off me. “And you left him there. Alone.”

The way he said it put a cold finger down my spine.

“He asked me to,” I shrugged.

“I’m sure he did.” He rose again, slowly, and for a moment the whole room seemed to lean towards him the way a room leans towards the largest thing standing in it. “Give him my regards when he finally crawls home. Tell him his father came looking.” He paused at the door. “And Aurelia. You look tired. A wife shouldn’t wear this much tired so soon.”

Then he was gone, and I stood in the ringing quiet telling myself he was only an old man who loved to unsettle people, and that I was letting him.

I couldn’t sleep, so near midnight I did the thing I always did when my head wouldn’t go quiet.

I worked.

Rieck’s study was the one room in the penthouse that was truly his, dark wood and leather and locked drawers, and he had asked me weeks ago to put the new company’s paperwork in order.

I was three folders deep into a filing box when a name stopped me cold.

Not mine. My father’s.

‘Derek.

The folder was thick and worn soft at the corners, his name typed small and black across the tab, and my hands went clumsy as I pulled it out.

I shouldn’t have opened it. But I opened it anyway.

It was a file on my father. A real one, heavy with reports and pictures and pages of dense official type, and I stood there in the lamplight reading about the man I had spent my whole life knowing almost nothing about.

‘Decorated officer. Exceptional record. One of the finest the department ever trained.”

Details from years that no one had ever told me about, gathered by someone who had gone looking long and hard.

My father. The man who left me at an orphanage gate and never came back. And my husband had a file on him inches thick. locked in a private room, and had never breathed one word of it.

Why?

Why would Rieck dig into my dead father? Why hide it? Why any of it?

I didn’t think it through. I picked up my keys.

I called him from the car. It rang and rang and went to nothing.

I called again at the next light. Nothing.

B.Thonates Betrayal a contracted revenge

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