Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 172

Chp 172: What He Wants.

Rock’s POV

Pregnant?

Not yours?

Two words, and every plan I had ever made for my life went out like a light.

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I looked at her. Aurelia, pale in the middle of the wreckage, one hand still on the wall, not denying it.

“Rieck,” she whispered.

I went for him.

I didn’t shout. I didn’t warn him. I crossed the floor with murder in my mind, and I meant to open his throat with my bare hands, and I would have.

But then she got there first.

Aurelia threw herself into the gap between us with her arms out wide, and I stopped so hard I nearly went

down.

“No!” She was crying. “No, no, no, stop. Stop it. Please.”

“Move.”

“I won’t.”

“Aurelia. Move.”

“You will have to go through me.” Her face was wet and grey and set like stone. “So go through me, Rieck. Go on.”

Kaelen breathed hard behind her. “Aurelia, get out of the way.”

“Don’t you dare speak to me.” She turned on him, and I have never seen her look at anyone the way she looked at him then. “You. You walked into this house and you said that out loud. In front of his men. In front of everyone.”

“Because it’s true.”

“You don’t know that it’s true.”

The room went still.

Kaelen’s face changed. “Aurelia.”

“You have no proof. None.” Her voice grew louder and cracked. “You felt something, you told me. You felt it. That isn’t proof, Kaelen, that’s a man deciding what he wants and calling it a fact.”

“One night,” he said. “I know what I know.”

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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“And I am married.” She was shaking so hard I could see it from behind. “I was married the whole time. So you can stand there and be sure all you like, but you can’t walk into my husband’s home and say that child

yours when you don’t know.”

Nobody moved. Not my men, not his.

I saw the fight go out of him. Not the anger. The fight. His shoulders came down an inch and his hands opened at his sides, and he looked at her for a long moment like a man reading something he didn’t want to finish.

“You really don’t know either,” he said. “Do you?”

She didn’t answer him.

“Then I will wait.” Kaelen wiped the blood off his mouth. “I’m not going to drag you out of here screaming. That’s not how I want you.”

“Kaelen…”

“When you are ready, you know where the mountain is.”

He looked at me last.

“Pup,” he said. “Take care of her, or I will.”

Then he walked out through my broken doors with his men behind him.

She apologized for six days.

“It was one night,” she said on the second day. “One. It meant nothing.”

I kept eating.

“Rieck, look at me.”

“I’m listening.”

“You are not listening, you are sitting there.” She pushed her plate away. “I thought you had chosen Selene. I had just found out your grandfather killed my father and you knew and you said nothing to me for a year. I was hurt and I was alone and I made one mistake and I have hated myself for it every single day / since.”

“I know.”

“Then say something.”

I set my fork down.

“What would you like me to say?”

“That you believe me.”

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Billionaire’s Betrayal. a contracted revenge

“I believe you,” I said. “That’s not the problem.”

e went very quiet. “Then what is it?”

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“Every time I look at you now, I see him standing in my hallway. That’s not something I can decide my way out of, Aurelia. I have tried. Six days, I have tried.”

“So you want me to leave?”

“No.” That came out too fast, and she heard it, and I hated that she heard it. “No.”

“Then what do you want?”

I looked at her for a long time. Her hands were on the table. Her ring was still on. She had eaten almost nothing.

‘Mine.’ That was what the animal in me said, day and night. ‘Mine anyway. Mine regardless.’

I stood up and left the room, because the truth was I didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t break one of us, and I had already broken enough this month.

I called them in on the seventh morning.

Twelve men around the long table in the east room. Tobias at my right. Maps down, the borders drawn in red, three years of scout reports stacked at my elbow.

“Ridgeline,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

“Sir.” Garrick leaned over the map. “Two ways in. The eastern road, which they watch day and night, and the high pass, which closes with the first snow. That’s four weeks out, maybe five.”

“Numbers.”

“Two hundred fighters he can call in a day. Three times that inside a week.” Garrick didn’t sugar it, which is why I keep him. “He has held that mountain for eleven years and no one has taken a single field off him.”

“Weaknesses.”

“The western line,” Tobias said. “Bren runs it, and he runs it thin. Kaelen trusts his people. That’s the crack.”

“Then that’s where we go in.”

The tension in the room changed and I felt it. A dozen men breathing differently at once.

“Alpha.” Tobias chose his words with care. “Go in for what, exactly.”

“Say it plainly.”

“Are we talking about a message,” he said, “or a war.”

I put both hands on the table.

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