Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 166

Chp 166: What I Found.

Aurelia’s POV

I left before dawn, before Kaelen could wake up and ask the question I didn’t have an answer to.

55 vouchers

I told myself it wasn’t cowardice. I told myself I just needed distance to think, and that Ridgeline, with his voice in every hallway and his scent on every stolen breath of mine, wasn’t a place I could think clearly in.

So I left a note, three lines, no signature, and didn’t look back at the villa as the car pulled away.

I had spent the whole drive down the mountain hating myself for the cowardice of it even as I told myself it

was mercy.

What was there to say to a man who believed that the child was his. Better to let him keep believing it quietly than see his face while I told him that I wasn’t sure.

The whole drive back to the city, the secret troubled my head.

“It is Rieck’s.”

I said it to myself over and over.

We were still married. Still husband and wife, whatever else had broken between us.

There was no reason it couldn’t be his, no reason at all.

“The timing doesn’t work.’

I shoved the thought down every time it came up because I couldn’t afford it.

If the timing didn’t work, if this child belonged to Kaelen and not to the man whose name I still legally carried, then everything I had spent a year building, the war against Dawson, the fragile truce with Rieck, the whole architecture of my life, came apart in a single breath.

I needed somewhere quiet. Somewhere that was mine, or had once tried to be. So without thinking too much about it, I told the driver to take me to the estate.

GOODDDOD000000

The mansion stood dark and quiet when I arrived, Rieck’s car absent from the drive, and something in me relaxed and tightened at once.

I had time, at least. Time to sit somewhere familiar and let my mind settle before I had to look him in the eyes and think about what version of the truth I could bear to give him.

The white leather and the tall black glass looked exactly as I had left them, untouched, unaged, as though the whole house had just been waiting for me to come back and finish whatever I had started here.

Standing in the entryway for a long moment, coat still on, I slowly let myself into his study.

1/3

16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

65 vouchers

I hadn’t meant to open anything. I told myself I just wanted the quiet of it, the smell of him still faint in the leather chairs.

But my hands found the desk drawer the way hands do when the rest of a person has stopped thinking about things, and I started sorting through the neat stacks of paper without any real purpose at all.

I told myself I was just organizing, the way I had once organized his hiring folders when we still trusted each other with small, ordinary tasks.

Then one folder stopped me cold.

‘Hebvron Legacy Clause. Confidential.

I knew, even before I touched it, that whatever was inside would not be small, and not be kind. Every locked drawer in this house had taught me that lesson already.

I shouldn’t have opened it. But I opened it anyway, because I had spent a whole marriage being protected from the truth and had promised myself, somewhere on that long drive down the mountain, that I was done being protected.

The language was old, formal, the kind lawyers use to make cruelty sound like housekeeping, every sentence buffed smooth of anything a reader might flinch at on a first pass.

I read the first paragraph twice before the meaning fully landed, and then I read it a third time, hoping I had somehow misunderstood.

‘Upon the production of a legitimate heir by the current Alpha, full and unconditional control of all Hebvron holdings shall pass to said Alpha. The bearing spouse, having fulfilled the sole condition of the marriage contract, may thereafter be released from all further obligation.’

I sat very still with the paper trembling in my hands, reading the words over and over, turning it every way I could to make it mean something kinder than what it plainly meant.

Released, like a debt settled. Released, like a hand finally opening.

Not once did the word turn into anything close to what a woman wants to hear about the man she has given her whole shattered heart to.

I thought of every marriage contract clause I had ever half read and half understood, back when I was too shattered by Dawson to ask hard questions of the next man offering me a ring.

I had signed my name to this. I had signed my name to my own eventual, legal, entirely lawful disposal, and no one, not Hebvron, not Rieck, not one single person in that whole cold family, had ever once thought I deserved to know it.

Once I give him a child, I am no longer necessary.

Every lovely moment came rushing back at once, twisted now, poisoned at the root.

The night he had begged me not to leave. The apology that had cost him, by his own admission, more than he had ever given anyone. His hand rising to my jaw like it meant something, every single time it happened.

2/3

16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

the one touch he had let no one else near.

55 voucherd

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify