Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 149

Chp 149: A Kind Of Peace.

Aurelia’s POV

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The bread was still a bit hot when Sonia set it down, and for one strange morning I let myself pretend I had always belonged at that table.

Kaelen sat across from me with his sleeves pushed back and a mug the size of a bowl in one huge hand.

“You slept,” he said. “I can smell it on you. Real sleep, not the kind you fake for doctors.”

“I didn’t know sleep had a smell.”

“Everything has a smell.” He tore a piece of bread and pushed the plate towards me. “Fear. Grief. Lies. Sleep smells the cleanest of all of them. You have been carrying the others so long you forgot what clean felt like.”

“You say strange things at breakfast.”

“I say true things at breakfast.” He grinned, easy and wide. “Most people can’t handle the truth before their second coffee. But you seem to be managing.”

I laughed before I could stop myself, a real laugh, and it startled me almost as much as it seemed to startle him. He looked at my face like he was memorizing it.

“There,” he said quietly. “That’s the sound I have been trying to get out of you since you woke up in my

house.”

I looked down at my plate so he wouldn’t see what that did to me.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “You really can’t say things like that to a married woman over breakfast.”

“I can say whatever I like at my own table.” He reached for the jam, unbothered. “You are welcome to be scandalized while you chew.”

“You don’t even blink when you say things like that.”

“Why would I blink at the truth?” He tilted his head, studying me the way he always did, like I was a puzzle he had already half solved. “You blink enough for the both of us, Aurelia. Every time I get close to something real, your eyes do this little flinch, like you are getting ready to be hit.”

I opened my mouth to argue and found I had nothing to say to that, because he wasn’t wrong.

We talked of nothing, after that, the way people talk when neither of them wants the real conversation yet.

The horses. The mountain weather, which turned in an hour here, sun to snow and back before a person could change their coat. He told me a story about Sonia losing a bet and having to muck out the stables in her good boots, cursing the whole herd by name, and I laughed again, and the whole meal passed lovely and

warm.

At some point I realized I had stopped counting the minutes until something went wrong. And that

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16:52 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

frightened me more than anything he had said.

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It didn’t last, because it never does.

I carried my coffee out onto the stone terrace afterward and looked down over the black mountains, and Rieck walked straight into my head the way he always did the moment I let my guard down.

I thought of his hands. I thought of the low sound he made when he was angry, and the different low sound he made when he wasn’t. I thought of him saying little wife, and of his mouth against my forehead the night he came home shaking and wouldn’t tell me why. I thought of Selene’s smile in that hallway, and the empty rooms of the penthouse, and every locked door I had learned not to knock on. And underneath all the wounds, the broken promise, the affair I still didn’t have proof of and couldn’t stop believing, there was the old stubborn truth I had been running from since the moment Kaelen carried me through that gate.

I loved him.

God help me, after everything, I still loved him.

Loving him didn’t undo what he had done. It didn’t bring back the year I had spent learning to trust a locked door. It only made the missing him hurt worse.

But loving him meant I couldn’t stay here, playing at a life that had never truly been mine to keep, no matter how well it seemed to fit.

I couldn’t stay here. Whatever this place did to my blood, whatever Kaelen made me feel when he looked at me like I was the only thing in the room, none of it changed the fact that I had a husband, and a war half won, and a whole life waiting for me back in that glass tower, however badly it had cracked.

Running here had been an accident. Staying would be a choice, and I wasn’t ready to make that choice for a man I had known three weeks over a man I had married.

So I went to find Kaelen and tell him I was leaving.

He was in his study, bent over a wide old map with a glass of something amber at his elbow, and he looked up the moment I filled the doorway, before I had made a single sound.

“You have that face,” he said.

“What face?”

“The one that means you have decided something and you are afraid I will talk you out of it.” He set down his pen. “Say it, little thing.”

“I’m leaving, Kaelen. Today, if I can arrange it.” I made myself hold his eyes. “Thank you. For all of it. The rescue, the doctor, the roof. I won’t forget any of it. But I have a husband, and a life, and I can’t keep hiding in your mountains from either one.”

16:52 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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