Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 155

Chp 155; Bold Night.

Aurelia’s POV

2)

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“But why?” I leaned forward against the seat, still half convinced I was dreaming him up out of exhaustion. “Why a taxi, Kaelen? Of every possible way to find me, you chose to drive a car with a light on the roof.”

“Because a black car with tinted glass following a runaway wife draws eyes.” He glanced at me in the mirror, one brow raised. “A tired man in a taxi at the end of his shift draws none at all. I didn’t survive as long as I have by being seen when I don’t want to be seen.”

“You could have just called.”

“You wouldn’t have answered.” He said it lightly, and it landed anyway, because he was right and we both knew it. “This way you had no choice but to look me in the eye.”

“You don’t know that I wouldn’t have answered.”

“I know you twice put a phone down last night without pressing anything at all.” He caught my shock in the mirror and didn’t gloat over it, which somehow made it worse. “News travels, little thing. Even old fashioned news, from a girl at a hotel desk who likes a generous tip.”

“You had someone spying on me?”

“I had someone making sure no one else was spying on you instead.” His voice stayed calm, but something under it wasn’t. “There’s a difference, and one day you will trust me enough to see it.”

“Trust doesn’t come as easily as you seem to think it should.”

“No.” For once the humour dropped entirely off his face. “I imagine it doesn’t, for a woman who has spent her whole life finding out the hard way who deserves it and who doesn’t. I’m not asking you to trust me tonight. I am only asking you to let me drive.”

Just then the light ahead turned red. He slowed, unhurried, and looked at me properly in the mirror for the first time since I had climbed in.

“Where to, miss,” he said, mock formal, the corner of his mouth curling.

“I don’t know.” It came out smaller than I meant it to.

“I think you do.” His eyes held mine, kind and knowing, and something in my chest tightened at the weight of it. “I think you know exactly where you want to go. You are just not bold enough tonight to say it out loud.”

I looked away first. I always did, with him.

The city thinned out behind us, glass towers giving way to lower rooftops and then to trees, and for a long while neither of us spoke.

16:54 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

He tried, eventually. He always did.

:

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“You know,” he said, “the last time I drove a stranger, she gave me directions in a language I didn’t understand and tipped me in coins from a country that doesn’t exist anymore. I still have them. I keep meaning to spend them somewhere.”

“That’s not a real story.”

“It is entirely real. I wouldn’t lie to a woman about coins.” He caught my eye in the mirror, grave as a judge. “Wolves. Kingdoms. My own intentions. Those I might shade a little. Coins, never.”

I laughed before I could stop myself, sharp and surprised, and the sound of it in the small closed space of the car startled me almost as much as it seemed to please him.

“There it is,” he said, quiet and pleased with himself. “I have missed that sound.”

I looked out the window so he wouldn’t see what that did to my face.

Because even laughing, even with the good feeling of him filling up the car, some cold part of me wouldn’t let go of the other man.

I thought of Rieck’s voice saying ‘it’s true, my grandfather killed your father, and of every year he had let me walk beside him not knowing. I thought of Selene’s smile in that hallway, and the door he had shut in my face a dozen times over a year, calling every quiet protection.

I hated that I could laugh at all tonight, when the man behind me in that apartment was still sitting somewhere in the wreckage of what I had said to him, and part of me had not stopped hurting over that either.

Grief didn’t go away just because a kinder voice was nearby to fill the quiet. I hated that I could laugh at all. I hated more that some stubborn, wounded part of me wished it were his voice making me laugh instead.

“You went somewhere,” Kaelen said, staring at me in the mirror. “Just now. Somewhere with him in it.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to. Your whole face changes when you think of him.” He said it without judgment, only observation, the way he seemed to catalog everything about me without ever once making me feel studied. “It’s all right, little thing. He is allowed to still live in there. I only hope, eventually, he learns to share the

room.”

“You are very confident he will have to share anything at all.”

“Oh I am very confident in a great many things.” He quickly glanced at me. “Confidence has carried me further than caution ever did. You might try it sometime. It suits people who have spent their whole lives being careful for everyone else’s sake.”

“And if I try it and it goes badly?”

“Then it goes badly, and you learn something true about yourself, which is worth more than never finding out at all.” He said it like it was the simplest thing in the world, and for one dangerous moment I almost believed

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16:54 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

him.

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