Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 164

Chp 164: Positive.

Aurelia’s POV

His knock came quick and hard, three sharp raps that rattled the door in its frame.

“Aurelia.” Kaelen’s voice had lost every trace of teasing. “Aurelia, open the door.”

“I’m fine.”

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“You don’t sound fine. You sound like a woman on the floor of her own bathroom.” There was a pause, tight with worry. “I’m giving you ten seconds and then I’m coming through this door whether it’s locked or not.”

“Kaelen. I said I’m fine.”

“And I’m telling you that I don’t believe you. Ten seconds, Aurelia. Nine.”

I dragged myself up on shaking legs, splashed cold water over my face twice, and forced my breathing into something that would pass for steady before I opened the door.

He filled the frame the second it cracked open, looking at me head to foot, and I saw him take in the pale face, the damp hairline, the way I was still gripping the edge of the sink for balance.

“Let me call for a doctor.”

“No.” I said it too fast, and saw him notice. “It’s just my stomach, Kaelen. Something didn’t agree with me. I just need to lie down.”

“You have gone through half a box of tissues and you can’t stand up straight.”

“I’m tired. That’s all this is.” I made myself meet his eyes, made my voice as calm as I could force it. “I promise you, if it gets worse I will let Sonia look at me. Right now I just want my bed.”

“You promised me that yesterday, in the street, before I nearly carried you home myself.”

“And I was fine by evening, wasn’t I?”

“Barely.” He crossed his arms, unconvinced, studying my face like a man reading a contract for the trap hidden in the fine print. “I don’t like this, Aurelia. You are hiding something from me, and after everything, 1 would think you had learned that hiding things from the people who care about you rarely ends well.”

The words landed harder than he meant them to, I was sure, and I flinched before I could stop myself.

He studied me for a long moment, and I could see him weighing whether to push, whether to just lift me and carry me to Sonia himself the way he had carried me after the fall.

But then something in my face must have told him tonight wasn’t the night to fight me on it.

“Fine.” He stepped back, though the worry didn’t leave his eyes for even a second. “But I’m checking on you in an hour. And if you aren’t better by morning, I’m not asking your permission again.”

1/4

16:55 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“Understood.”

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“Aurelia.” He caught my chin gently before I could turn away, tipping my face up to his. “Whatever this is. If it turns out to be more than a bad stomach, you will tell me. You won’t sit alone in a locked room thinking you have to carry it by yourself.”

“I hear you.”

“That’s not the same as promising.”

“It is the closest thing to a promise I have left in me tonight, Kaelen.” I managed something close to a smile. “Let it be enough.”

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I sat in my room for a long time, replaying the last few weeks in my head, and the more I turned them over the harder it was to keep calling this nothing.

The nausea hadn’t started today. It had crept in slowly, an off feeling in the mornings I had blamed on grief, a sudden aversion to coffee I had blamed on exhaustion.

Twice this week I had barely finished a meal before it came back up. I had told myself, every time, that it was stress, that a body could only carry so much before it started rebelling against everything, including food.

I made myself stand and try again anyway, forcing down a few dry crackers Sonia had left on my nightstand days ago.

Ten minutes later I was back on the bathroom floor, retching over the sink with tears streaming down my face, and this time, kneeling there with my whole body shaking, another thought slid in beside the fear and wouldn’t leave.

When was the last time?

I slowly counted backward, my fingers pressed to my lips as I ran through the weeks in my head, and the answer landed in my chest like a stone dropped down a well.

Weeks. Far too many weeks. I had been so consumed with grief and betrayal and running that I hadn’t even noticed my own body keeping score.

Late. Sick every morning. My whole chest went tight and cold at once, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in the fine hair standing up along my arms.

“It is not possible.”

Except it was. I knew exactly which night it would have happened, if it had happened at all, and my whole body flooded hot with shame and terror in the same breath.

Sitting on the cold tile with my knees drawn to my chest, I thought of Kaelen’s face in the doorway, worried and sweet and entirely unaware, and of Rieck’s face the last time I had seen it, and of a whole new life that might already be growing inside me that belonged to neither the marriage I had walked out of nor any future I had ever once let myself imagine.

2/4

Er

16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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