Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 154

Chp 154; The Long Night.

Aurelia’s POV

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The night air overwhelmed me the moment the elevator doors opened, and I stood in the lobby of the building I used to call home with no idea at all where my feet were meant to take me.

I had nowhere to go and that was the truth of it.

No apartment of my own. No family waiting up. A husband behind me who had just confirmed the worst thing I had ever let myself imagine, and a mountain kingdom hours away that I had walked out of on my own two feet not four days ago, telling its king I would be back.

I thought of Kaelen.

I thought of his hand over mine on the stone step, of ‘this door stays open, of how easy it would be to just keep walking until I found a road that led back to him.

But I didn’t go.

Something in me refused because if I ran to Kaelen tonight it wouldn’t be because I wanted to. It would be because I was drowning and he happened to be the nearest strong thing, and I had spent my whole life being handed to men because it was convenient for someone else.

I wasn’t about to do that to myself. Not tonight, of all nights.

So I walked.

I walked without any real direction for the better part of an hour, past shuttered storefronts and the tired lights of streetlamps, past a couple arguing softly outside a bar and a man walking a small dog that stopped to sniff my shoes and wag its tail as though nothing in the world had gone wrong tonight.

I passed a window full of wedding dresses, lit and empty at this hour, silk and lace draped over headless forms like ghosts of a happiness I no longer trusted. But I didn’t slow down. I made myself keep walking, because if I stopped in front of that glass for even a minute I was afraid of what I might let myself feel about the white dress still hanging in my own closet, in an apartment I couldn’t go back to tonight.

I checked into the first hotel with a light still on, and told the girl at the desk I didn’t need anyone to help with my one small bag, and rode the elevator up alone.

90000000000000

The room was clean and anonymous and utterly quiet, a bed no one had ever slept badly in, curtains that had shut out a thousand strangers’ griefs before mine.

I lay on top of the covers still in my coat, staring at a ceiling that belonged to no one, and my mind wouldn’t stop circling the same small picture.

My father. A man I had never once truly known.

I had built him, over the years, out of scraps. A badge number memorized off a single faded picture. The

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16:53 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

55 vouchers

particular slant of his handwriting on the one letter that had somehow followed me into every foster placement, traced with my finger a hundred times as a child, wondering what his voice had sounded like saying the words on the page. I had told myself stories about him at night in that orphanage, comforting fictions where he was searching for me every single day, held back by something unfair, coming for me the moment it was safe.

‘He is coming back for me when it is safe.’

I had believed that lie until I was old enough to know better, and even after, some small stubborn part of me had never quite let it go.

He hadn’t been looking for me. He had been dead. Killed by the very family that would, decades later, put a ring on my hand and call it destiny.

I wondered, lying there, whether he had known he was in danger at the end. Whether he had thought of me in whatever room it happened in, a small girl he had left at a gate with a promise he never got the chance to keep. I hoped he hadn’t been afraid. I hoped, foolishly, uselessly, that some part of him had known I would grow up to survive it anyway.

Turning to my side, I pressed my palm flat against my chest, as if I could somehow reach the thing in there that was cracking open, and hold it still.

“You knew,” I thought, and it was Rieck’s face I saw, not my father’s. “You knew, and you let me marry into it anyway, and you let me fall in love with you while my father’s blood was still wet on your family’s hands.”

I took out my phone twice, thumb hovering over his name, just to hear his voice.

But twice I put the phone back down on the pillow beside me without pressing anything at all.

I didn’t cry as I had cried enough in that apartment for one lifetime.

I just laid there in the dark hotel room, wide awake, listening to the building settle and a siren pass somewhere far below, until the window behind the curtain went from black to grey to a pale reluctant gold, and morning arrived without ever once bringing me any peace.

I checked out the next evening, when the day had finally exhausted itself and I couldn’t stand the sight of that ceiling one more hour.

The lobby smelled of nothing, that usual hotel nothing, and I stepped out into the cool blue dusk with my bag over one shoulder, the streetlights just starting to flicker on along the avenue, and I raised my hand for the first cab I saw, too tired to care which company, too tired to care about anything except sitting down somewhere that wasn’t that bed.

It slowed and stopped at the curb. I pulled the door open and slid into the back seat without looking, the way you do when your whole body has stopped bothering to pay attention.

“Where to,” the driver asked.

I froze.

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16:54 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

55 vouchers

I knew that voice. I would have known it anywhere, low and edged with something wild, a voice that had whispered against my hair on horseback and breathed my name into a spring full of steam.

My eyes came up to the mirror.

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