Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 156

Chp 156; Eastward.

Rieck’s POV

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As usual, she walked into my office without knocking, as though every door in my life was hers by right.

“I have no time for you.” I didn’t look up from the report I wasn’t reading. “I’m busy, Selene.”

“You are always busy. It’s your favourite disguise.” She crossed the room, unhurried, and I heard the click of the lock turning behind her.

“Fuck off.”

“You keep saying that.” She perched on the edge of my desk, close enough that her perfume went straight through the paper and ink smell of the room. “And you keep not meaning it.”

“Get out.”

“Make me.”

“I’m really not doing this today.”

“You never are, and yet somehow, every time, I still end up sitting on your desk.” She said it lightly, but there was something sharp underneath it, a woman keeping score. “You threw me out of your house four nights ago and told me it was done. Here I sit anyway. Ask yourself why that is, Rieck.”

“Because you don’t fucking listen when a door is closed.”

“Because some part of you never quite locks it.” She smiled, slow. “You are not doing anything today. That’s exactly the problem.”

I stood up then, meaning to walk her out myself, and that was my first mistake.

She was closer than I had accounted for, and the exhaustion in me, four sleepless nights deep, four nights of a house that still smelled like her, made me slower than I should have been.

“Don’t deny it.” Her hand rose to my chest, and I didn’t step back quickly enough. “You want me. You always have, and you always will. She is not coming back, Rieck. I am right here.”

“You are not her.”

“No.” Her mouth curved, very close now. “I am something you can actually keep.”

The cold that lives under my skin should have moved and thrown her clear across the room. But for some stupid reason, it didn’t.

Some starved, ruined part of me, the part that had spent four nights alone in an apartment full of her ghost, leaned in instead, and I kissed her, hard and hating myself for every second of it

As my hands caressed her waist, the better part of me stood off to one side screaming that this was exactly the

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

weakness that had cost me everything already.

Then the door burst open.

“Rieck. It’s urgent.”

164

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We broke apart. Tobias stood in the doorway, and to his credit his face didn’t so much as flicker at what he had walked in on.

Selene straightened her blouse, unbothered, almost pleased with herself, and slid off the desk.

“We will finish this later,” she said, and left without waiting for an answer.

I, on the other hand, just stood there with the taste of her still on my mouth and a disgust in my chest that nearly buckled my knees.

“What?” I said. “What is urgent?”

“One of my men picked up a lead. Downtown, near the old hotel district.” Tobias shut the door and didn’t comment on the perfume still hanging in the air, though I saw him clock it anyway. “Aurelia was seen getting into a taxi two nights ago.”

My whole body went still. “Where?”

“That’s the good news and the bad news at once.” He held up his phone, a grainy street camera still. “She got in. The cab pulled out heading east. Straight out of the city.”

“East?” I repeated. “Show me the plate.”

“Half obscured. We are running what we have.” He hesitated. “There’s something else you should know before you decide what to do with this.”

“Say it.”

“The driver wasn’t logged for that route. Not a company shift, not a fare called in. Someone drove that cab to her specifically, Rieck. This wasn’t luck.”

There was almost nothing east of this city worth driving towards. Empty highways, small towns, and past all of it, mountains that belonged to a man I had spent years learning to hate on principle.

“Kaelen,” I said, and the name came out of me like a curse.

“We don’t know that.” Tobias held up a hand. “It could be anyone with the resources to send a private driver instead of a company car. It could be Hebvron testing you. It could be Dawson trying to draw you out.”

“It is Kaelen.” I already knew it in the same place I knew when a storm was coming before the sky ever changed colour. “That taxi didn’t belong to any company. It belonged to a man who has been circling her since the night he pulled her half drowned out of the alley.”

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