Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 145

Chp 145: Signs Of Life.

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34

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The key was still under the third flowerpot, where it had always been, and that was the first thing that was

wrong.

Charlotte let herself into Adrian’s apartment on legs that didn’t want to hold her, and stood in the dark little hallway of a dead man’s home, and waited for the grief to hit her the way it had every night for a week.

And it did hit. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and let the tears come, standing there in the smell of him, cheap cologne and old coffee and the flat staleness of a place no one had opened up in days.

Except the place wasn’t stale.

That was the second wrong thing. The window over the sink stood cracked an inch, and the air moved, and when she made herself walk the rooms she saw the small wrongnesses everywhere.

His mail, gone from under the slot. His laptop, gone from the desk. A drawer not quite closed. A week of gray dust disturbed in long streaks, as if gloved hands had gone over every surface and set most things back and not quite all.

Someone had been here. Someone had been here after.

At the moment she moved slower, and every step made it worse.

His toothbrush, gone from the glass by the sink. His good coat, gone off the hook. But his keys still hung by the door, and his shoes still sat in their row, and a man doesn’t leave the world for good without his keys and stop to take his toothbrush.

A man who is coming back does that. Or a man being kept somewhere by someone thoughtful enough to pack him a bag.

Charlotte stood very still in the middle of the room, her heart climbing into her throat.

Dead men didn’t get visitors. Dead men’s apartments sat and went sour until a landlord cleared them out.

Nobody came into a dead man’s home a week on and searched it clean and cracked a window to let the smell

out.

Just then there was a sound behind her. A soft thud.

She turned so fast she nearly went down, a scream halfway up her throat.

A cat was in the bedroom doorway, staring at her. Adrian’s cat, the ugly gray thing he had loved too much, and it was fat, and calm, and clean, and its bowl in the kitchen was full of fresh food she had not put there.

Somebody was feeding the cat.

Somebody had been coming here, day after day, into the home of the man she had paid to have killed, feeding his cat and going through his things, and she didn’t know who, and she didn’t know why.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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Without thinking, she locked the door with shaking hands, put the key back under the pot, and hurried down the stairwell unable to shake the feeling of eyes on the back of her neck.

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She didn’t sleep. Again.

She sat in the dark of her own living room with cold tea going colder between her hands and turned it over and over, and none of it fit.

The cat, fed. The mail, gone. The laptop, gone. The gloved search.

She had ordered a man killed and dressed up as a suicide.

Quiet. Clean. No questions, no investigation. So who searched his rooms?

The police didn’t put on gloves and feed the cat. A grieving family didn’t carry the laptop and leave the television.

This wasn’t grief and it wasn’t the law. This was somebody hunting for something, somebody patient and professional, and the only professionals in Charlotte’s life were the ones she had hired herself.

“The assassins,” she told herself. Maybe they had gone back to clean up. To be sure.

That was it. It had to be that. She let herself breathe.

Then the colder thought moved in underneath, the one she had been holding off since the moment she saw that full bowl.

You don’t feed a cat for a week when you are cleaning up a killing. You feed a cat for a week when you are waiting for someone to come home.

She immediately set the mug down before her hands could drop it.

Waiting for someone to come home.

But Adrian wasn’t coming home.

Adrian was dead. She had watched him die on a five inch screen and been sick over it.

Unless the thing she had watched was not the thing that had happened at all.

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In the morning she called the number.

The one she had memorized and never once written down, the one that belonged to the flat calm man from the parking garage.

It rang a single time and dropped into a voicemail with no name and no greeting, only a tone.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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She hung up. She called again an hour later. The same. She called that afternoon, and that night, and the next morning, and every time it rang once into that same empty nothing, and slowly the truth of it settled over her like cold water.

He wasn’t avoiding her. He was gone. His number was a dead line ringing in an empty room.

The men she had paid to make a person vanish had vanished themselves.

That was when she stopped telling herself stories.

She found the hacker the same way she had found the killers, through the ugly corners of the city that would find you anything for the right cash.

A boy, really. No older than twenty, in a basement that smelled of energy drinks and hot electronics, who didn’t ask her name and didn’t want it.

“Look at this video,” she said, and set the phone on the table between them. “Tell me if it is real.”

He watched it once. His face didn’t move. He watched it again, slower, dragging a finger back and forth along the bar at the bottom, and something in him sharpened.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“Does it matter?”

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