Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 146

Chp 146; A Dead Man’s Phone.

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The video was a fake. Charlotte had made the boy in the basement say it three times, and three times he had said it exactly the same way.

Bored. Very sure. Final. A fake. Nobody died.

She sat in her car outside that basement for an hour with both hands locked on the wheel and couldn’t make herself drive.

Because if the video was a lie, then Adrian wasn’t in the ground. And if Adrian wasn’t in the ground, then Adrian was somewhere out there, breathing, and Adrian knew that the woman who loved him had handed his picture to three killers in a parking garage.

She thought about all the things that couldn’t be true and were.

A doctored video. A grief she had swallowed whole for a lie. Some part of her still begged for it to be a mistake that the boy was wrong, that the light and the blood were only tricks of a cheap screen.

But there was one way to know for sure, and she was terrified of it.

She drove to a corner store and bought the cheapest phone they had, the kind with buttons, the kind you paid for in cash that no one could ever trace back. Then she sat in the lot and peeled the plastic off it with shaking fingers and dialed the number she had spent a whole week trying to scrub out of her head.

Her thumb hung over the last digit for a very long time. Pressing it felt like stepping off a ledge in the dark, not knowing if there was ground.

If no one answered, she could go on grieving, go on pretending, keep the life she had. But if someone answered, everything ended.

After a long while, she pressed it.

It rang and that was the first wrong thing.

A dead man’s number should be disconnected. Three flat tones and a recorded girl telling you the line was no longer in service. But this one rang until someone picked up.

For a moment there was only breathing, and the small sounds of a room she couldn’t see.

“Hello?”

Charlotte stopped breathing entirely.

“Hello, who’s this?” The voice was rough, and tired, and unmistakably, impossibly alive, and it belonged to a man she had seen bleed out on a five inch screen. “Say something or I’m hanging up.”

She couldn’t have said a word even if her life depended on it. Her whole body had turned to stone. She knew that voice the way she knew her own name. She had whispered against it in the dark. She had lied to it, and taken money for it, and in the end, when it wouldn’t stop threatening her, she had paid three men to silence it forever.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

And here it was. Breathing in her ear. Waiting.

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She ended the call and then just sat there with the cheap phone in her lap and the whole world roaring in her ears, and she knew, at last and completely, that she was in more trouble than she had ever been in her entire life.

Adrian was alive.

She should have felt something like relief. She hadn’t killed a man after all. Her hands were clean.

But there was no relief anywhere in her, only a cold rushing dread, because a living Adrian was a thousand times more dangerous to her than a dead one had ever been.

A dead man kept his secrets. A living one, held somewhere by someone she couldn’t see, was a mouth waiting to be opened.

She didn’t remember driving home.

She sat on the edge of the bed in the apartment Dawson paid for, inside the life Dawson had built her, and she made herself think. Really think, the way she had refused to for a week.

Someone had known.

Someone had known she meant to have Adrian killed, and had gotten there first, and had taken him alive, and had spent real money making her believe she had succeeded.

And Adrian would talk. Men who wake up in a stranger’s basement always talk. He would give whoever held him every last thing. The affair. The money. The baby that wasn’t the child she told the whole world it was.

Charlotte pressed both hands hard over her mouth.

If Adrian talked, all of it came apart at once. The lie she had built her entire future on. And there was only one man in her life with the reach to buy a staged death.

She wouldn’t let herself finish the thought. She couldn’t bear to put his name to it.

There was only one thing left to do. The thing she should have done a year ago, before the money and the lies and the dead man who wouldn’t stay dead.

Run away.

She moved quickly.

She hauled the good suitcase out of the closet and threw it open on the bed and started emptying drawers into it, not folding, not choosing, just fistfuls.

The cash from the safe. The jewelry he had bought her that would sell clean. Her passport. The little in this

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

glittering life that was truly hers.

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