Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 168

Chp 168: Tracks.

Rieck’s POV

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I rode out before sunrise, ten men at my back, and didn’t slow until the trees on the eastern line swallowed the last of the morning sun.

“Here.” Tobias reined in first, crouching low over a stretch of muddy earth near the treeline. “This is where the first sighting happened.”

Dropping down beside him, I looked at the ground and my chest immediately went tight.

Paw prints. Dozens of them, scattered wide across the forest floor, crossing and recrossing in patterns no ordinary patrol left behind.

I ran two fingers along the edge of the deepest print, reading the shape.

“These are not ours,” I said.

“No.” Tobias crouched beside me, running his own gloved fingers along a second print a few feet off. “The gait is wrong. Too wide at the shoulder, too light on the paw. Whoever these wolves are, they move differently than we do.”

“How many, by your count.”

“Six sets, minimum. Maybe more in, where the ground gets harder to read.” He straightened, scanning the treeline. “This wasn’t one animal passing through by accident. This was a patrol.”

I moved down the line, print after print, and the pattern sharpened the longer I looked at it.

Not a single confused wolf that had wandered off its own land by accident. A dozen, moving, doubling back on themselves in places, the marks of animals that had crossed this exact stretch more than once.

“Scouting,” I said quietly. “Not trespassing. Scouting.”

“Whose?”

“Kaelen’s of course.” I said it before I had finished reasoning my way to it. “I would stake my own name on it.”

“That’s a serious claim to make off a set of tracks, Rieck.”

“It is not off the tracks alone.” The direction told me everything besides, the tracks bending away east, deeper into land that belonged to no one under my command.

Tobias’s jaw tightened. “You are sure?”

“I have smelled his territory once before, on my own wife’s coat, weeks ago, and I haven’t forgotten it.” The cold in my chest spread sharper. “This isn’t a mistake. He doesn’t send scouts by accident.”

“What do you want to do?”

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16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

55 vouchers

“Double the patrols along this line. I want eyes on this stretch every hour, day and night. If a single paw crosses that border again, I want to know within the hour, not after the fact.” I stood up, brushing the dirt from my knees, staring east toward mountains I couldn’t see from here but had thought of every day since a taxi had disappeared into them. “Whatever he is building towards, I intend to know before he finishes building it.”

The house was quiet when I finally made it home, the kind of quiet that had started to feel less like peace and more like something being held together.

I found her curled under the blankets when I returned, staring at nothing, the way she had looked every evening for a week now.

“Aurelia.”

She didn’t move.

Without thinking, I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, close but not touching.

“I know something is wrong,” I said. “I’m not asking you to explain the clause again, or forgive it tonight, or any of it. I just want to know that you are all right. That’s all I am asking.”

Nothing.

“Aurelia.”

“I’m tired, Rieck.” Her voice came out flat. “That’s all.”

“You have said tired every night this week.”

“Maybe I’m just tired every night this week.”

I studied her for a long moment and wanted, badly, to ask the question troubling me. But I didn’t trust myself yet to ask it and hear the wrong answer.

“If there is something you need to tell me,” I said quietly, “I would rather hear it badly than not hear it at all.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Aurelia, look at me.”

She didn’t. Her eyes stayed fixed on some point past my shoulder.

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said again, softer this time, as though repeating it might finally make it true.

I stood up then, because staying meant pushing, and pushing had cost me too much already this month to risk it again tonight.

At the door I paused, my hand on the frame, and looked back at her one last time.

2/4

16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

56 vouchers

“I am not going anywhere, Aurelia. Whatever this is. Whenever you are ready to say it, I will still be standing here.”

I left with the same cold, useless frustration I had carried out of that room every night this week, sure now, more sure than ever, that whatever she was hiding went far deeper than one legal document and one broken promise.

The call came before I had finished my coffee the next morning.

“Sir.” A guard, young, breathless, still in his coat, knocked twice on the frame before he had fully decided to enter. “You need to see this.”

He led me down to the security office, where three screens glowed pale in the dim room and a technician sat frozen over the controls.

“Show him,” the guard said, stepping aside so I could see the screen directly.

The footage rolled, grainy and slow, timestamped from the small hours of the night. Figures moved along the treeline at the edge of a section of the estate I rarely walked myself, hooded, unhurried in a way that told me they didn’t expect to be seen.

Three of them. Then a fourth, further back, watching the others move.

“How long were they on the grounds?”

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