Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 139

Chp 139: Nowhere Left To Go.

Aurelia’s POV

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There’s a kind of quiet that isn’t peaceful. It’s the quiet of a house where two people have stopped trying. And I lived inside it for four days before I said a full sentence to anyone.

I stopped eating at the table. I drank my coffee cold, because heating it up meant standing in the kitchen where he might walk through.

Marta noticed.

She found me at the window on the fourth morning with a cup I hadn’t touched, and she didn’t ask if I was all right, because she was too kind to make me lie.

“You haven’t eaten since Tuesday, Mrs. Valerius.” She set down a plate of cut fruit I wouldn’t touch either. “A body can’t grieve on nothing. It needs fuel to break its own heart.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I know.” She sat, something she rarely did, and took my cold hand in both of her warm ones. “I have buried a husband and two sisters, child. Let me tell you the one thing worth keeping. A bad season always swears it will last forever. But it never does. Winter is very sure it is the end of the world. Spring proves it a liar every single year.”

“What… what if I chose the winter myself?” I whispered. “What if I signed my own name to it?”

“Then you learn, and you choose better after.” She squeezed. “And your spring comes anyway. God has never once run short of them.”

“You really believe that?” I said. It came out more broken than I meant it to.

“I have to, child. A person doesn’t carry what I have carried without something to hold on to.” She smoothed the hair back from my face, the way I imagined a mother might have once, if I had ever had one. “You will believe it again too. Not today. But again.”

I let her hold my hand as it was the only lovely thing I had felt in days.

But when she left, the cold came back, and the fruit went brown on the plate, and I understood that no kind word, however true, could reach the place in me that had gone dark.

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Rieck stopped coming home before midnight.

When he did come, he moved through the penthouse like a man skirting a room with a body in it.

He worked. He always worked. Work was the one door he could bolt from the inside where I couldn’t follow.

I still tried.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“We should talk,” I said one night, when he came in past one and turned straight for his study.

“About what?”

“About us. You put a knife in me a week ago and you haven’t said one word since.”

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He didn’t stop walking. “I have three sites behind schedule and a father trying to take the rest of my company from me. I don’t have room for this tonight.”

“For me. You mean you don’t have room for me.”

He paused in the study doorway, his back to me, and the air in the hall dropped a few degrees.

“What do you want me to say, Aurelia?”

“Sorry.” My voice shook. “You could start with sorry.”

He turned then. And for one breath I thought I had reached him.

His eyes moved over me, the swollen face, the robe I had worn three days running, and something crossed his face that might have been pain, if I still believed him capable of it.

Then it closed over, the way it always did.

“Go to bed, Aurelia,” he said. “You are drowning, and I can’t pull you out. Not tonight.”

“You are the one holding me under.”

He had an answer to that. I saw it reach his mouth. Then he buried it, the way he buried everything, and he shut the door in my face.

Three more nights of it. Three nights of eating alone and sleeping on the far cold edge of a bed that used to be the only safe place I had.

On the third the walls started to lean inward, and the quiet took on a sound, and I couldn’t bear to draw one more breath inside those glass walls.

So I left.

I didn’t bother with a note.

He wouldn’t be home to read it.

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The bar was three blocks from the tower, dim and loud and full of strangers who didn’t know my name, or my marriage, or the file with my father’s name on it that still sat unread at the bottom of my bag.

I ordered something brown and strong, the thing Dawson used to drink, because I wanted to understand at last what a person was running from when they drank like that.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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I lost count somewhere. Enough that the room went soft at the edges. Enough that when the bartender asked if I wanted to call someone, I laughed out loud, because who on this earth would I call.

Marta would come. She would come in her nightgown at any hour and never say a word about it. But I couldn’t make that kind old woman climb out of bed to scrape me off a barstool.

So I said no one, and I ordered another, and I drank alone in a room full of people, which was the loneliest way there was to do it.

Then I was outside, and the cold night hit me, and the street tilted like the deck of a ship.

I was doing the weird drunk walk, heel to toe, all my attention on the pavement, when I heard them come off a stoop behind me.

Three. Maybe four. They spread around me the way men do when they have done it before.

“Hey, sweetheart. You lost?”

“Leave me alone.” I kept walking. My heart had gone stone sober even if my legs had not.

“That’s no way to be friendly.” One moved in front of me. Another closed the gap behind. “Pretty little thing like you shouldn’t be out here on her own.”

“I said leave me alone.” I reached for my phone. But then a hand knocked it spinning into the dark.

“Now. That was rude.”

Before I could do anything else they moved in.

I opened my mouth to scream and a palm clamped over it, and the fear that ripped through me was so cold and so total that something far down in me woke up and pushed, harder than my arms should have been able to, and the man holding me actually staggered back a step.

But it wasn’t enough. I knew it in the same breath.

Pushing one of them was never going to be enough.

Just then a hand fisted in my hair. Another tore the strap of my bag.

I heard my own dress rip at the shoulder, and I thought, with a strange flat calmness, so this is how it happens.

Not to other women, in the news, far away. To me. Tonight.

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