Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 161

Chp 161: What He Will Take.

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Charlotte fainted in the kitchen, and the only reason Dawson called an ambulance instead of just looking was the thing growing inside her.

He sat beside her hospital bed now, hands folded, the picture of a worried husband for the benefit of the nurses drifting past the door, and the moment the last one left he let the mask slip enough to speak the truth.

“You understand why you are still breathing,” he said, low and pleasant. “It is not because I have forgiven you. It is because that baby is the only reason I haven’t already ended you.”

“Dawson…”

“Don’t.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to. “You are a disgrace, Charlotte. Pathetic. A woman I trusted with my name, and you spent it on lies from the very first night we met.” He leaned closer, close enough that she flinched back against the pillow. “But the child. The child… I’m keeping. The moment it is born, it becomes mine. Fully. Legally. You will have no more claim on it than the maid who launders its sheets.”

Charlotte’s face drained of every last drop of colour.

“You can’t do that.”

“I can do anything I like. I have the money, the lawyers, and now, thanks to you, every reason in the world to take it. You gave me that reason yourself. Congratulations.”

“You aren’t even his father.”

“I am the only father that child will ever legally have.” He said it flatly. “Biology is a footnote, Charlotte. Paper is forever. You taught me that yourself.”

She didn’t know, of course, exactly how deep his reasons ran. She thought this was a wounded husband’s cruelty. But she had no idea it was a father claiming an heir he needed for a war she had never once been told about, a war with a rival house and a rival wife and a rival claim that couldn’t be answered with anything less than a Valerius child of his own.

“Please.” Her voice cracked. “Whatever I did, don’t take my son from me.”

“You should have thought of that,” Dawson said, “before you decided I was a fool worth robbing.”

“I never took a single dollar that wasn’t…”

“You took my name.” His voice stayed even, which was worse than shouting. “You took two years of my life. You took the one thing I actually wanted from this marriage. So don’t sit there and tell me what you did or didn’t take, Charlotte. I have done the arithmetic. You are just the last to see the final number.”

The doctor came in a few minutes later, chart in hand, brisk and professional.

“Mrs. Valerius is severely stressed,” she said, glancing between them. “Elevated blood pressure, poor sleep by the look of her charts, signs of real anxiety. For the health of the pregnancy, I would strongly recommend a

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16:55 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

calmer environment. Whatever is happening at home, it needs to stop.”

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“Of course.” Dawson took Charlotte’s cold hand in both of his, gently, convincing, a performance he could have delivered in his sleep. “I didn’t realize how much strain she was under. I promise you, doctor, things will be different. I intend to do better.”

Charlotte’s eyes cut to his, wide and disbelieving, and he held her gaze and smiled, kind on the surface, ice underneath, until she looked away first.

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They brought her home that evening, and the two guards were waiting in the lobby exactly as before.

“Same arrangement,” Dawson told them. “No visitors. No phone that isn’t mine to check. She doesn’t leave this building until I say otherwise.”

“You promised the doctor,” Charlotte said, once they were alone. Her voice had gone very small. “A calmer environment.”

“I promised her things would be different.” He shrugged out of his coat, unbothered. “They are. You are no longer permitted to run.”

“This isn’t a calm environment, Dawson. This is a cage.”

“Oh, cages are very calm,” he said. “Nothing moves in them that isn’t allowed to.” He crossed to the window, back to her, done with the conversation before she was. “You will find, given time, that stillness suits you rather well. It suits everyone, once they stop fighting it.”

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He went to the office the next morning because the alternative was another day trapped in that apartment with a woman he could no longer stand to look at without wanting to break something.

But he couldn’t concentrate there either.

Charlotte. Carrying another man’s child inside her, letting him believe for months that it was his, spending his money on the man who had actually put it there.

He turned the whole ugly shape of it over and over behind his desk, and somewhere under the calm, controlled surface he wore for the world, something in his blood stirred and didn’t settle.

He wasn’t going to kill her. He had decided that on the plane, and the decision hadn’t changed since.

Killing her would be quick, and quick wasn’t what she had earned.

He was going to take everything from her instead, slowly, the exact way she had tried to take his name and his fortune from him.

The child, first, the moment it drew breath. Then the money, the apartment, the whole extravagant life she had built on a lie.

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16:55 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

。

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He would let her see every piece of it leave her hands one at a time, and only then, once there was really nothing left for her to lose, would he decide what came after.

‘After she puts to birth.’

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