Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 169

Chp 169: His Certainty.

Aurelia’s POV

ཐཱ

55 vouchers

I kept the test hidden inside a folded scarf at the back of my drawer, and some nights I took it out just to look at it, as though staring hard enough could tell me what to do.

Before I found the clause, I had pictured telling Rieck a hundred different ways.

His face going soft with something I had rarely seen on it. His hand finding my stomach before I had even finished the sentence.

I had let myself want that, quietly and foolishly.

But now the picture curdled every time I imagined it.

If the clause was truly what it said it was, then a child wasn’t a joy to him. A child was a key. The final signature on a contract that ended with me discarded, quietly written out of a life I had spent a year learning to survive inside.

I turned the wedding band on my finger the way I had done a hundred times these past weeks, round and round, as if I could somehow twist it loose from everything it had come to mean. But it didn’t budge, and neither did the thought.

When I couldn’t sit in that room with it a moment longer, I told Ronan I wanted the mall, and he didn’t ask why, and for a little while, moving through bright aisles of ordinary things, perfume counters and racks of clothes I didn’t really see, I let myself believe distraction might actually work.

I was halfway through a rack of scarves when a hand closed around my wrist and pulled me sideways into the narrow gap between two shuttered storefronts.

I opened my mouth to scream.

“Aurelia. It’s me.”

The hood fell back just enough, catching the mall lights for one brief second, and my scream died in my throat.

“Kaelen.” My heart slammed painfully hard, my whole body flooding at once with fear and something far more complicated than fear. “What are you doing here? You can’t be here, this is his territory, if anyone sees

you…

“I didn’t come here to be seen.” His eyes quickly moved over me, the way they always did when he was checking for damage he couldn’t otherwise account for. “I came to see you.”

“You can’t just drag me into alleys, Kaelen, this is…”

“The baby is mine.”

The words landed flat, and for a moment the whole crowded mall seemed to go quiet around us.

1/4

16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“You don’t know that.”

a55 vouchers

“I know it.” He said it the way he said everything, confident past the point of argument. “I felt it the moment I found that test on my own bathroom floor. I haven’t been wrong about you once since the night I pulled you out of that alley, Aurelia, and I’m not wrong about this.”

“That’s not how any of this works. You don’t just feel a thing true and have it become true.” My voice shook. “We were together once. Once, Kaelen. You can’t… you can’t build a certainty this size on a single night.”

“I can, and I have.”

“What if you are wrong?”

“I am not wrong.”

“But what if you are.” My hands had curled into fists at my sides. “What happens to you, Kaelen, if you spend the next months sure of something that turns out to belong to another man entirely.”

Something in his face tightened, just for a moment, but then he forced a small smile.

“Then I will be wrong,” he said, quiet now. “But I don’t believe I am.”

“You are being reckless. You are standing in the middle of a crowded mall, in enemy territory, whispering that a child is yours before anyone has confirmed anything at all.”

“I am being honest, which you seem to find harder to accept from me than from him.” Something flickered across his face, hurt under the confidence. “You know what I felt that night. I know you felt it too.”

“Feeling something doesn’t make it a fact, Kaelen.”

“No.” He held my eyes, unblinking. “But it makes it worth saying out loud, even in a place I’m not supposed to be standing.”

“Kaelen…”

“I’m not done with this conversation.” He glanced past my shoulder, and then stepped back into the shadow of the doorway. “But I can’t stay. Not here. Find me when you are ready to stop pretending you don’t already know the answer.”

“Kaelen, wait…”

But he was already gone, swallowed into the crowd, and I just stood there alone between two shuttered stores with my heart still hammering and no answer to give either of us.

A woman passing with two children glanced at me, curious, and I realized I was still pressed against the cold metal shutter as though it could hold me up.

I immediately made myself straighten, made myself breathe, and walked back out into the ordinary bright noise of the mall as though the whole world hadn’t just quietly rearranged itself around me.

005000000пoooo

2/4

16:56 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

I couldn’t stop replaying it the whole drive home.

e

55 vouchers

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify