Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 140

Chp 140; Loose Ends

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The room was three floors underground, where the city couldn’t hear a sound. And that was the whole point of building it.

Dawson took the one good chair, poured a scotch he didn’t intend to drink, and let his man talk.

“It went clean,” Vance said. He stood with his hands folded, the way good men stand when they bring good news. “She believes every part of it.”

“Walk me through it.”

“She hired three killers herself. Met them in a parking structure, paid cash. Amateur work.” A thin smile. “We were on her before she reached her car. We let the contract run just long enough to look real, took the target quietly, and put down the men she paid.”

“How many knew the target lived?”

“The three she hired are accounted for. Two of ours did the lifting. They won’t talk.”

“Everyone talks. That’s the one dependable thing about people.” Dawson swirled the scotch he wasn’t drinking. “Make sure your two understand what becomes of men who grow tiresome.”

“They understand.”

“And the footage?”

“Staged. A studio job. The right room, the right blood, a body that films like his.” Vance shrugged. “She watched it. She cried. She deleted it. As far as your Charlotte knows, the man is in the ground and her secret went down with him.”

Dawson turned the glass in his hand and didn’t smile.

So. His sweet, weeping Charlotte had hired men to murder a person, grieved over it like a widow, then came home to his bed and slept like a child.

He had married several kinds of women in his life, but he had never before married a murderer. It was almost impressive.

He had spent good money and better patience turning that woman into the mother of his heir. He had let her spend his fortune and wear his name and sleep beside him with her small soft hands folded over his son. And she had looked him in the eye across a hundred dinners and called it love.

He wanted, very much, to be surprised by any of it. He found that he wasn’t.

“The assassins?” he said.

“Gone. No thread runs back to her, or to us.”

“Good.” He set the glass down. “Bring him in.”

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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They dragged the man in and locked him into the chair bolted to the floor, and Dawson looked, for the first time, at the person his wife had loved enough to kill for.

He wasn’t much. An ordinary face and a broken lip. The kind of man you would pass on the street and never turn your head for.

Dawson had expected more. He always did.

“Adrian Cole.” He lit a cigarette slowly, and let the man see him do it. “You have caused me a truly remarkable amount of paperwork.”

“Whatever she told you, it’s a lie.” Adrian’s voice was a wreck. “She lies about everything. You of all people should know that.”

“Oh, I know exactly what she is.” Smoke drifted between them. “What I don’t yet know is what you are. So. You will tell me what you were to Charlotte, and what those pretty little messages meant, and you will tell me

now.”

“I don’t owe you a word.”

“No. You don’t.” Dawson said it pleasantly. “Men have sat in that chair and given me nothing for hours. I keep their pictures. None of them walked out, and a few of them never did much again but sit and stare at a wall and wet themselves.” He tapped ash on the concrete. “Your choice entirely.”

“Go to hell.”

Dawson sighed, the tired sigh of a man whose evening was running long. Then he nodded to Vance.

The shot cracked through the concrete, far too loud, and Adrian came up off the chair screaming as the bullet took the smallest toe clean off his left foot.

“That was the small one,” Dawson said over the noise, bored. “I have nine more, and then we move on to the parts with real personality. Talk.”

Adrian curled around the ruin of his foot, gasping, rocking.

For a moment Dawson thought he would have to nod at Vance a second time. Some small ugly part of him hoped so.

Then the man broke, the way they all break, all at once and all the way down.

“The baby.” He folded over his ruined foot, sobbing. “The baby is mine. It’s mine, all right. It was always mine.”

The room went very still.

“Say it again,” Dawson said quietly.

“She came back to me. One last time, before she went and landed her rich man. She was already carrying it when she met you. Before you ever laid a hand on her.” Adrian’s laugh was wet and cracked. “The heir you

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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have been guarding. The son you were going to raise. He’s mine, down to the blood, and she has known it since the very first day.”

“You’re lying,” Dawson said, and there was no weight behind it, and they both heard that there was none.

“Why would I lie now?” Adrian spat blood on the floor. “Look at my foot. What is left to lie for. Do the arithmetic yourself. The dates. The doctor. You never once questioned it, because it never once crossed your mind that a woman could look at you and see a wallet where a king was supposed to be.”

“And the money?” Dawson said. His voice had gone flat and strange.

“Her idea. A little insurance. I play the desperate ex, she pays me off with your money, we split it, nobody ever looks twice.” He lifted his head, and something almost like victory sat in his ruined face. “She played you, Valerius. From the first hello. That child will carry your name and your fortune and not one drop of you.”

Dawson didn’t move.

That was the thing men never understood about him until it was too late.

Other men shouted. Other men broke furniture.

Dawson went quiet, and the air in the room cooled around him, and somewhere far under his skin the old Valerius blood he never spoke of woke up cold.

His heir. The one clean piece he had left on the board. The son who was going to answer Aurelia and her rival brat, and answer Hebvron, and answer all of it.

Another man’s son.

Everything he had built to win this war, he had built on that child. The heir who would strip Aurelia’s claim to nothing. The blood that would finally shame Hebvron.

For a moment he couldn’t see. For a moment there was only a white buzz, and under it the very old, very patient wish to take this ordinary little man apart with his hands.

He let himself want it for as long as he ever let himself want anything. Then he set it down, the way he set down everything that didn’t serve him.

Rage was for men who couldn’t count. Dawson had always been able to count.

One of the guards read his master’s face and made a choice. He stepped in, raised his pistol, and pressed the muzzle to the side of Adrian’s head.

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