Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 152

Chp 152: Is It True.

Rieck’s POV

:

55 vouchers

The call came in at half past four, and I knew from the first breath on the line that it was bad news before the man ever opened his mouth.

“Nothing,” Tobias said. “We have pulled every camera between Warren Street and the river. We have leaned on every contact I own. There is no trail, Rieck. It’s like she stepped off the edge of the world.”

“Keep looking.”

“I have had six men on this for days. There’s nothing left to pull.”

“Then get twelve.” My voice had gone flat and cold, the voice I use when I have stopped being able to trust myself to sound like anything else. “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care who you have to threaten. Find my wife.”

“Rieck, I have to ask. If she left on her own. If she doesn’t want…”

“She doesn’t just vanish.” The words came out of me low and hard. “Not without a car, not without a trace, not from a man who tracks blood for a living. Someone has her, or someone is helping her hide, and I am done pretending it is a coincidence.” I stood up, and the room felt suddenly too small to hold what was moving through me. “Pull every favour I have ever spent on you. Every one. I will owe you the rest, and I will pay it gladly, if you bring her home.”

“I hear you.” There was a small pause. “We will find her, Rieck.”

“Find her.”

I ended the call before he could say whatever useless thing was coming next, and I sat there in the quiet of my own office with my hand still curled around the phone, and something in my chest that had been holding steady for days just gave out.

Without thinking I threw it.

It left my hand before I had made up my mind to throw it, and it crossed the whole width of the room and struck the glass wall hard enough to spider a crack through six feet of tempered pane, and the crack ran and ran and didn’t stop until it reached the ceiling.

Suddenly the door opened.

“Rieck.” Elara stood in the doorway, pale, one hand still on the frame. “I heard something break. Are you…”

“Out.”

“Sir, if I could just…”

“Get out, Elara.”

1/4

16:53 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

55 vouchers

She went. She was good enough at her job to know when a closed door was the only thing keeping the room from getting worse, and she pulled it shut behind her without another word, and I sat alone with the cracked glass and the dead phone in pieces on my white floor and I didn’t move for a long time.

00030000000000

I didn’t go home that night. And I didn’t go home the next one either.

I sat in that office long after the building emptied, staring at contracts I couldn’t read, and every single time my eyes moved from the page they found her.

Aurelia at this desk, weeks ago, laughing at something Elara said. Aurelia asleep against my shoulder on a flight I couldn’t now remember the destination of. Aurelia’s hand rising to my jaw, the one touch I had ever let past the wall I keep around everything that matters.

I had spent thirty years building a man who didn’t need anyone. Then I had married her, and somewhere in the space of a single year that man had quietly died.

I couldn’t eat. Marta left plates outside my study and I let them go cold. I couldn’t sit through a meeting without losing the thread of it halfway through, twelve men waiting on an answer while I stared at a wall and thought about a woman who was not in the room.

Twice that week I caught myself reaching for my phone before I remembered it was in pieces on my office floor.

Guilt sat under all of it because of Selene.

The night I had told myself didn’t count because I hated myself while it happened, as though the hating changed anything. I had failed her long before she vanished. I had made myself into exactly the man she already believed me to be, and then let her walk out the door still not knowing the whole of what I had done, and some nights that quiet felt like the worse crime of the two.

She had walked out on the worst version of me. And I couldn’t stop hunting for her, couldn’t stop hating myself, couldn’t stop the low constant fear that the next call would tell me they had found her, and that finding her wouldn’t mean what I needed it to mean.

Well, on the fourth night, I went home because staying away had stopped feeling like discipline and started feeling like cowardice.

0050005000000

I smelled her before I opened the door.

Vanilla. Rain on cedar. My whole chest seized around it, and for one wild disbelieving second I thought I had finally cracked, that grief had started making her scent out of nothing at all.

Then I stepped inside, and she was real.

She sat at the dining table in the low light, still in the coat she must have worn to get here, a glass of amber liquid at her elbow that she was turning slowly between two fingers.

2/4

16:53 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

:

Scotch. My wife didn’t drink scotch. My wife barely drank at all.

“Aurelia.”

55 vouchers

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify