Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 165

Chp 165: The Empty Room.

Three days, and Kaelen still couldn’t name what he had done wrong.

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“Aurelia.” He caught her in the corridor outside the kitchens, the closest he had gotten to her in two full days. “Walk with me a moment.”

“I can’t. I’m tired.”

“You are always tired now.” He kept his voice light, though something under it was fraying. “Yesterday you were tired. The day before, you had a headache. I’m running out of ordinary reasons to believe.”

“Kaelen, please.”

“Please what? Please stop noticing that the woman I…” He stopped himself before the word could finish leaving his mouth, and she flinched at the half of it anyway, and was gone down the hallway before he could say another word.

He had tried sweetness first, on the first day, when he still believed this was grief circling back to claim her. He had left small things outside her door instead of knocking, warm bread, a book he thought she might like, and every morning found them untouched.

On the second day he had tried humour, the only tool he had ever really trusted, and saw it slide straight off her without leaving a mark.

Nothing worked. Nothing so much as slowed her down.

He stood there for a long moment, alone in the corridor, replaying every hour of the last week for some fault he had missed.

The market. The stars she had named after nothing at all. The night that had changed something in both of them, or so he had believed until she started disappearing from every room he entered.

He was a king who had commanded armies without a flicker of doubt. Men twice his age had knelt at his word without needing it repeated.

But he couldn’t, for the life of him, command one frightened woman to just look at him, and the powerlessness of that twisted in his chest.

He had asked Sonia whether Aurelia had said anything to her. And she hadn’t.

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By the fourth evening he had run out of patience for waiting to be sought out.

He went to her room himself, ready to knock until she let him in, ready even to apologize for whatever he couldn’t name, only to find the door standing open and the room oddly quiet and empty.

“Aurelia.”

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16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Nothing answered him.

:

He quickly crossed the threshold and saw that her coat was gone from the hook.

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The small bag she had carried in from the city was untouched on the chair, which meant nothing, because a woman desperate enough could leave with far less than a bag.

“Sonia.” He was in the hallway shouting before he had fully decided to. “Sonia!”

She appeared from the stairs, alarmed. “What is it?”

“Have you seen her? Today. Any time today.”

“Not since breakfast. She said she had a headache and wanted to rest.” Sonia’s face changed as she read whatever was written across his. “Kaelen, what’s wrong?”

“Her coat is gone.”

“Maybe she only went walking.”

“She doesn’t walk alone this far from the house anymore, not since the horse.” He was already moving past her, back into the room, his eyes cataloguing every detail with a speed that felt more animal than reasoned. “Something is wrong, Sonia. I can feel it the way I feel weather coming.”

He looked at the neat bed, the closed window, the bathroom door standing half open at the far end, and then suddenly something small and white caught his eyes on the tile.

The bathroom light had been left on, a small careless oversight that told him she had left in a hurry, or without thinking clearly at all.

He crossed the room and crouched, and for a moment he didn’t understand what he was looking at.

Then he did, and the whole world went very quiet around him.

A pregnancy test. Two clear lines across the small plastic window.

Positive.

His heart didn’t just skip. It stopped, one full suspended beat of real quiet in his chest before it slammed back twice as hard, and his hand closed around the little device so tight he half expected it to crack.

“Mine.”

The thought arrived before he could stop it, before he could reason his way anywhere near it.

The night in her room came back to him whole, unbidden, her hands in his hair, her voice breaking his name in the dark, the way she had looked at him after.

He had no knowledge of any other man having touched her since the night he pulled her half drowned from that alley, no reason at all to imagine this belonged to anyone but him, and every part of him wanted it to be true with a fierceness that startled him even in the middle of his fear.

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16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

She was carrying his child.

And she had spent three days running from him instead of telling him.

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“Is… she running away? To him?” Kaelen muttered, and then the old wolf part of him that never fully slept raised its head and understood, with a clarity that frightened even him, exactly how far he was prepared to go to stop her.

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