Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 150

Chp 150; Proof.

Aurelia’s POV

“Say that again,” I whispered. “Say it again, because I don’t think I heard you right.”

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“You heard me.” Kaelen didn’t hold back. “The Valerius family are not builders who happen to be wolves, little thing. They are killers who happen to build very tall buildings. And your husband’s grandfather killed your father.”

“That’s insane.” I stepped back from him, my hand finding the doorframe. “That’s completely insane, Kaelen. You can’t just say something like that and expect me to…”

“Believe me. I know.” He crossed his arms. “You would rather believe your father just left you. I understand that. And I don’t blame you for it.”

“You’re lying.” I said it flat, daring him to argue. “Or you are wrong. There’s no other option, because if what you are saying is true, then my whole marriage was built on a grave.”

“It actually was.”

“Don’t say it like that. Like it’s nothing.”

“I’m not saying it’s nothing.” His voice dropped, and for once there was no wildness in it at all, only something quiet. “I’m saying it’s everything, and I’m saying it because you deserve to have carried it a great deal sooner than tonight.”

“But… you… I…”

“Let me show you instead of telling you.” He held out a hand towards the hallway. “Come. I won’t ask you to take my word for anything.”

I didn’t take his hand. But I did follow him.

0000000000000

The computer room smelled of dust and old metal, and a young man I had never met sat hunched over three glowing screens, code scrolling faster than I could read.

“The drive,” Kaelen said, “the one you stole from Dawson’s vault. The one that was damaged when you brought it to me. It was real damage. I didn’t lie about that.”

“Then how…”

“Because damaged is not the same as dead.” He nodded at the tech. “Show her.”

Suddenly the screen was filled with a scanned document, old, the paper yellowed, a seal I recognized from Rieck’s own study stamped across the bottom corner.

“This came off the drive,” the tech said, without looking up. “Buried three folders deep, encrypted twice.

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16:52 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Whoever hid this didn’t want it found. But data doesn’t really die. It just goes quiet.”

I made myself read it.

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A police file. My father’s name at the top, Derek, the rank, the badge number I had memorized as a child from the one picture I owned of him. And below it, in a different hand, a note. ‘Subject eliminated per Lord Valerius. Case closed, records sealed.’

At that moment the room tilted.

“No.” I shook my head. “No, this could be forged. This could be anything. You could have made this.”

“I could have.” Kaelen’s voice lowered, which somehow made it worse. “But I didn’t. And there’s one more thing on that drive, little thing, that I think you already know how to read even if you have never let yourself look at it.”

The tech pulled up a second file. A picture, grainy, old. A young man in a suit standing beside an even younger woman, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.

My father.

Standing beside Rieck’s grandfather.

Friends, once. Or something close to it, before whatever happened between them ended with one man’s daughter growing up in an orphanage believing she had just been left behind.

“He knows,” I said, and my voice came out very small. “Rieck. He has a file on my father. I found it myself, in his study.”

“He knows all of it.” Kaelen came closer, and the pine and snow of him wrapped around me, and for once I didn’t step away. “He has known since before he ever put a ring on your hand.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can, because there’s a date on that file, little thing. The day the investigation was reopened, and quietly buried a second time.” He nodded at the screen. “Look at it yourself. It was reopened the same month Rieck’s father started arranging your contract. He didn’t marry a stranger. He married the daughter of the man his own blood put in the ground, and he did the arithmetic before the ink was ever dry.”

0003000000000

I didn’t leave the house for three days.

Sonia brought food I didn’t eat. Kaelen sat with me in the evenings and didn’t fill the quiet with anything I couldn’t bear, and somehow that was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in longer than I could remember.

“You haven’t laughed once in three days,” he said, on the third night, low, close, his shoulder against mine on the wide stone step. “I have started to miss it. That sound you make when you forget to guard yourself.”

“There’s nothing to laugh about.”

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16:52 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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“There rarely is, and people find a way anyway.” He turned his head, studying me in the dark the way he always did, like he could see straight through to whatever I was hiding even from myself. “You are allowed to grieve twice,” he said. “Once for the father you never got to know. And once for the husband who let you keep believing a lie.”

“I keep trying to decide which one I’m allowed to be angrier about,” I said. “My father, for a crime he never chose. Or my husband, for a lie he chose every single day since.”

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