Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 153

Chp 153; The Leaving.

Rieck’s POV

‘How the fuck does she know?’

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The thought overwhelmed me before anything else could, sharp and useless, a man reaching for the wrong question in the one moment that mattered least for asking it.

I had buried that file.

There was no road that led from my locked study to her standing in my dining room with that flat, terrible

calmness on her face.

“How,” I said. “How do you know that?” I heard the words leave me and immediately hated them, hated that of every question in the world that was the one my mouth had reached for first.

“That’s not the question you should be asking me right now.”

She was right. And I knew she was right even as I stood there wanting to ask it again.

“It doesn’t matter how I know.” Her voice didn’t rise. That frightened me more than shouting would have. “What matters is whether it is true.”

I could have lied. God knows I have lied to prettier faces than hers and slept fine after. But I looked at her instead, at the woman I had spent a year failing in a hundred small quiet ways, and something in me just refused to add one more lie to the pile.

“It is true,” I said. “My grandfather killed your father. Lord Valerius. Years ago, before either of us was old enough to understand what that family truly was.”

She wasn’t surprised. She had already known. I could see that now, see that she had walked in here already carrying the weight of it, and my confession only confirmed the last small hope she had been holding onto that it might not be.

“And you knew.” Two words, quiet, devastating. “You have known the whole time. You married me. You put a ring on my hand. You let me build a life on top of the exact grave your family dug for my father, and you never once said a word.”

I had no answer for that. There was no answer for that. I stood there with my whole chest twisting slowly while she saw me fail to find one, and the quiet stretched out long enough to be its own confession.

“I’m leaving,” she said.

“Aurelia.” I said her name like it was the last solid thing I had left to hold onto, and maybe it was.

“Don’t.” She stood, and the coat she had never taken off fell straight around her. “Don’t say my name like that. Like it still means something to you.”

“It means everything to me.” The words tore out of me raw. I had spent thirty years learning to say nothing that could be used against me, and here I was, handing her the one weapon I had left. “I know I don’t deserve

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16:53 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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to say that. I know it doesn’t fix one single thing I have broken. But it’s true, and I’m done letting you leave this apartment without hearing it at least once.”

“It’s too late for the truth, Rieck.” She was already moving towards the door. “You had a year to give it to me. You chose every single day not to.”

I caught her wrist. Just that. Just enough to feel her pulse throbbing under my fingers, proof that some part of her was not as cold as her voice.

“Please.”

I had never once said that word to another living person in my adult life. It came out of me broken and small, and for half a breath I saw something in her waver.

Then she pulled free, and walked out, and the door closed behind her with a soft and final click that I haven’t stopped hearing since.

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I didn’t function for four days.

I sat in rooms I didn’t remember entering. I signed contracts I couldn’t have repeated back a sentence of. Every scent of vanilla or rain on a city sidewalk stopped me dead in my tracks.

I kept her side of the closet exactly as she had left it. I told myself it was reasonable, that there was no reason to disturb it, and I knew even as I told myself that it was a lie. I stood in that doorway some nights just to breathe in what was left of her, a starving man rationing the last of something he had thrown away with his own two hands.

Selene came on the third night. I don’t know how she got past the door.

“You look terrible,” she said, standing too close in my own living room, the way she always stood too close. “Let me help you forget her for one night.”

“Get out.”

“Rieck.” Her hands slowly rose towards my chest, the same move that had worked on me once before in a moment of weakness I would carry the shame of for the rest of my life.

I caught her wrist the way I had caught Aurelia’s, except this time there was nothing sweet in it at all. “I told you we were done. I meant it then. I mean it more now.” My voice came out cold enough that she actually stepped back. “You are not her. You will never be her.” Something in my chest cracked open saying it, some door I had kept shut even from myself. “I used to think love was a weakness men like me couldn’t afford. She taught me otherwise, and then she left, and now I only have the weakness with none of the woman who was worth it. There is not a warm body in this city that fills one single inch of the hole she left, and I am done pretending otherwise for the sake of one quiet night. Get out of my house, Selene, or I will have you removed from it.”

She left, angry, muttering something about regret I didn’t have the strength left to care about.

I sat alone afterward in the dark and understood, fully, for the first time, that I had built my whole life around a woman I had lost through my own hand, and that no one else on this earth was ever going to be able to

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16:53 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

stand where she had stood.

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