Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 173

Chp 173: On My Own Terms.

Dawson reserved the restaurant himself, because a man should always pick the room where he plans to enjoy himself.

Empty at four in the afternoon. His own people on the door. A bottle of scotch open on the table before his guest had even arrived, poured into two glasses so that Kaelen would have to look at one whether he drank it or not.

Kaelen arrived nine minutes late and didn’t apologize.

“You’re taller than I remember,” Dawson said.

“You’re smaller.” Kaelen dropped into the chair across from him. “What do you want?”

“I heard a story about you.”

“People tell stories.”

“This one is very good.” Dawson turned his glass by the rim, slowly, enjoying it. “Alpha King. Rival territory. Walks into another man’s house, through the front doors, with guards. Breaks half the furniture in the place. Gets thrown out on the street like a drunk.”

“I walked out.”

“That’s not how the city is telling it.”

“The city talks too much.” Kaelen leaned back. “Say the thing you actually called me here to say. I have a

mountain to run.”

Dawson smiled and let the quiet sit a moment longer, because quiet is cheap and it always makes the other

man pay.

“Fighting over another man’s wife,” he said. “It rarely ends well. I speak from a very sure amount of experience.”

“I am not chasing another man’s wife.”

“No?”

“I am protecting the mother of my child.”

Dawson laughed. He couldn’t help it. It came out of him bright and delighted, and he set his glass down so he wouldn’t spill anything on the tablecloth.

“Your child?”

“Mine.”

“Oh, that’s marvellous.” Dawson wiped his eye with one knuckle. “Do you know, that woman spent two years in my bed swearing she couldn’t carry a child at all. Two years. And now she’s a season into a new marriage and every Alpha in the country wants to put his name on her stomach.”

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“Careful.”

areful?” Dawson picked up the scotch again. “I’m being generous. I could be unkind. I could point out that a woman who lifts her skirt for the husband, the uncle’s son, and now the neighbour is not really a mystery at all. She is just a whor…”

He didn’t finish the word.

Kaelen came across the table so fast that the bottle went over and Dawson didn’t hear it break.

A hand closed on his jaw. One hand. It covered half his face and it shut his mouth for him, and the wood of the table pressed hard into his spine as he was bent backwards over it.

“Say the rest,” Kaelen said. He wasn’t shouting. He sounded almost friendly. “Go on. Finish it.”

Dawson’s men were moving somewhere behind him. He lifted two fingers off the table and they stopped

“Good boy.” Kaelen said.

He let go.

Dawson sat up slowly and straightened his white jacket, one lapel and then the other, and found that his hands were not quite steady.

“You will never speak about her that way again.” Kaelen was already at the door. “Not to me. Not to your driver. Not into a glass at midnight when you think nobody can hear you. Are we clear?”

“You’re bleeding on my floor,” Dawson said. “Your hand. The glass.”

“So I am.”

And he was gone.

Dawson sat alone in an empty restaurant with a broken bottle at his feet and thought that he had just made a serious mistake in how he had measured that man.

The report reached Kaelen four days later, and he read it three times before he said a single word.

“Where did this come from?”

“The city.” Bren stood at the edge of the desk with his hands behind his back. “A clerk in Rooffe Construction. She has taken our money for two years and never given us anything worth having until

now.”

“Read me the part about the pass again.”

“They want it mapped before the first snow. Every ridge, every water source, every place a man can hide.” Bren turned the page. “They want somebody inside our western line within three weeks. And they are asking which of our people can be bought.”

“Bought?”

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“That’s the word he used.”

elen laughed once, and it didn’t sound like a good thing.

“Anything else?”

“One more line.” Bren hesitated. “A commander asked him plainly whether this was a message or a war. He said it wasn’t a message.”

Kaelen put the papers down and went to stand at the window.

Below him the valley was going gold at the edges, the way it did in the last weeks before the cold came down.

Eleven years he had held this mountain. Eleven years, and not one man had taken a single field off him.

“He is angry,” Kaelen said.

“He is.”

“Not clever. Angry.” He tapped one finger slowly against the glass. “Bren, a clever man doesn’t send scouts to buy my people three weeks before he moves. A clever man moves first and explains afterwards. This is a man whose pride is bleeding, and a bleeding man walks in a straight line.”

“So we wait?”

“No.” Kaelen turned around. “We choose the ground.”

“Say that again.”

“If I sit on this mountain and let him come, then he picks the day, he picks the road, and he picks how many of my men go into the earth for it.” He crossed to the long map on the wall and put his palm flat on the eastern pass. “But he only has one way up here before the snow. One. And I know it better than he knows his own house.”

Bren was already smiling. “The narrows.”

“The narrows.”

“That’s a killing ground.”

“That’s why I picked it.”

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