Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 148

Chp 148; Your Baby

She immediately started to stammer and that was how Dawson knew he had her.

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In a year and a half he had never once seen Charlotte lost for a word. She lied the way other people breathed, never a flicker. And now she sat across from him at thirty thousand feet with her mouth opening and closing on nothing, and it was, he thought, the most honest she had ever been in his company.

“I… I was… Dawson… I only” She couldn’t land a single sentence. “It is not, you have to understand, I…”

“Where are you going, Charlotte?” Still pleasant. Still patient. “It isn’t a hard question.”

She kept making that broken useless sound, and something in him that had been holding by a thread for three days finally let go.

He raised the pistol off his knee and pointed it at her face.

The cabin went quiet but for the engines. Her eyes went huge and white. And the cold that lived in him, the old Valerius cold he had spent his whole life pretending he didn’t carry, poured out and filled the little space until he saw her breath fog in front of her mouth.

“The truth.” His voice had dropped into something that wasn’t quite human, and he didn’t care. “You tell me the truth, right now, or I paint this very expensive cabin with it. And don’t say your mother. We both know there is no sick mother, sweetheart. There never was.”

The last of her colour drained away.

“Dawson…”

“Speak.”

She was crying now, both hands up in front of her as if hands could stop a bullet, and still nothing came out of her but broken pieces, and his finger took up the slack on the trigger, and some wicked part of him wanted very badly to just be done.

He had killed before. But not often.

He liked it done at a distance, by men whose names he made a point of forgetting. But he had done it with his own hands once or twice, when a thing was personal enough to be worth the mess, and this, God help him, had turned personal.

“Last chance,” he said. “Speak, or I pull it.”

“So you are going to kill your baby?”

The words burst out of her, high and desperate, and her hand flew to the swell of her belly, cradling it, playing the one card she believed she had left.

Dawson almost laughed.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

It was, he had to grant her, a good card.

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A year ago it would have worked flawlessly. A year ago he would have lowered the gun, and hated himself for the softness, and married her by spring.

But she had no idea. That was the exquisite part, the part he would savour later when he was ready for it.

She sat there weaponizing a child that wasn’t his, betting her life on his hunger for an heir that carried not one drop of his blood, and she didn’t know that he already knew.

Had known for weeks. Had shot the truth out of another man in a concrete room three floors under the earth.

She thought she was saving herself. She was performing for an audience that had already read the last page.

He let the quiet go on. He let her believe it was working.

Then, slowly, he lowered the gun.

“No,” he said quietly, as though the thought of the child had reached some soft place in him, as though he were a man wrestling something down. “No. Of course not.”

Because a dead Charlotte at altitude was a body he would have to explain, and a living one was still of use, and because the game he was playing ran longer and colder than a bullet.

A bullet would end it far too soon. She would learn that. In time she would learn exactly how little mercy this

was.

He slid the pistol back inside his coat, stood, and pressed the intercom by the cabin door.

“Turn us around,” he said. “We are going home.”

They landed a little after three in the morning, and he brought her back up to the apartment she had tried so hard to run from, and he didn’t let go of her arm once the whole way up.

“You are going to stay in,” Dawson said at the door, pleasant as ever, as if they were discussing the weather. “For a while. Until the baby comes. It isn’t safe out there for you, sweetheart. Running around the city in your condition. Anything could happen to you.”

“You can’t keep me here.”

“I can do anything I like.” He smiled at her. “You are the mother of my child. I only want you protected.”

“Protected.” She laughed, high and cracking. “Is that what the men in the lobby are for?”

“You noticed them. Good.” He was almost pleased. “It means you understand the shape of things, and I don’t have to be crude about explaining them.” He sweetly tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and felt her go rigid under his hand. “Rest, sweetheart. Think of the baby.”

He saw her flinch at my child, and he kept his own face perfectly, beautifully blank, because that was the

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

whole art of it now.

34

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She had spent eighteen months performing a love she didn’t feel. So he could perform an ignorance he didn’t have. He had learned from the very best.

There were two of Vance’s men in the lobby. Two more she would never see on the floor below. Her passport had already gone from her safe into his. The accounts she believed were hers alone had been quietly frozen an hour before the wheels touched down.

She was, for all the softness of his words, a prisoner in a set of very comfortable rooms, and she didn’t fully grasp it yet.

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He went to the office in the morning, because staying in that apartment with her felt like sharing a room with a bomb.

Yet he couldn’t work.

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