Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 174

Chp 174; He Didn’t Do it For You.

Aurelia’s POV

The house felt wrong the second I stepped through the door.

No guards on the drive. No boots in the hallway. Nine years of Marta humming somewhere near the kitchen and today there was nothing, just my own footsteps going too loud across the marble.

“Rieck?”

Nothing.

“Marta?”

I found her at the top of the stairs with a folded sheet pressed against her chest.

“When did they leave?”

“Mrs. Valerius…”

“Marta. When?”

“Before light.” Her mouth trembled. “All of them, child. Every man on this estate.”

I was already moving but then his office door stood half open so I pushed it and stopped.

Maps everywhere. Spread across the desk, pinned to the wall, one still on the floor where it had slid off and nobody had bothered to pick it up. Papers with red marks all over them. A chair knocked back and left knocked back.

I put my hand flat on the desk and made myself read.

Eastern pass. Narrows. First snow.

Numbers beside the words. Two hundred, three hundred, crossed out and written again. A line drawn thick and hard along one thin road, and at the end of that road, circled twice in red, one word.

Ridgeline.

My knees nearly went.

“He’s gone to kill him,” I said out loud, to nobody.

Without thinking I ran.

“Ronan!” I was screaming his name before I reached the drive. “Ronan, the car, now!”

“Mrs. Valerius, the Alpha said…”

“I don’t care what he said.”

“He said you were not to leave the grounds today.”

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

I got into the back seat and pulled the door shut.

When he can punish you tomorrow,” I said. “Drive.”

I heard it before I saw it.

The sound came down the mountain road while we were still climbing, and it didn’t sound like men.

“Stop the car.”

“Ma’am…”

“Stop the car, Ronan.”

I got out and ran the last stretch on foot with my coat open and my hand pressed flat under my ribs, and when I came around the shoulder of rock I saw the narrows below me and my whole body locked.

They were everywhere.

Bodies in the road. Men on the rocks above the road. Steel and shouting and the awful wet sounds underneath the shouting, and the smell rolling up the slope at me, earth and musk and blood, so thick I had to put my sleeve across my mouth.

And in the middle of it, the two of them.

Rieck was bleeding from somewhere on his head, his shirt gone dark down one whole side. Kaelen circled him with that terrible patience, and even from up here I could see the difference between them.

Rieck was fighting.

Kaelen was working.

“Stop,” I said. It came out as nothing. “Please, stop.”

Nobody heard me. Nobody could have heard me.

Kaelen took him off his feet. I saw my husband go down into the dirt and I felt it in my own chest like a hand closing.

! “Rieck!”

He got up. Of course he got up. He got up and went in again and Kaelen put him down a second time, harder, and this time his men were falling back around him and the line was folding in on itself, and I immediately knew that I was about to watch him die.

Without thinking I started down the slope.

“Kaelen!” I was crying now, sliding, catching myself on rock. “Kaelen, stop it, stop, please….”

The first gunshot cracked across the valley and I dropped flat without wanting to.

Then more. Four, five, six, spaced out and calm, one after another, and each one took a man off his feet.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Kaelen’s men. Only Kaelen’s men.

seventh spun Kaelen halfway around.

He went down on one knee with his hand clamped over his shoulder, and for one second nobody on that road moved at all.

“Back!” His voice came up the valley, still huge, still steady even with blood coming through his fingers. “Off the road! Now!”

They went. Two hundred men melted into the trees in under a minute, taking their wounded with them. and the narrows emptied out until there was nothing left but Rieck’s people and the dead/

I looked up and there was a man on the ridge above us.

He stood with his back to the whole valley, hood up, pistol still in his hand and pointed down at the ground now.

He didn’t run. He didn’t hide. He waited, with his back turned, while Rieck dragged himself up out of the

dirt.

“You,” Rieck called up. His voice was wrecked. “Whoever you are. Thank you.”

The man didn’t turn around.

“I didn’t do it for you,” he said.

And then he was gone over the top of the ridge and there was nothing up there at all.

He wouldn’t let me touch him.

“Sit down, Rieck.”

“I’m fine.”

“You have blood in your hair.”

“It’s not mine.”

“Some of it is yours.” I got the basin down on the table beside him anyway, and the cloth, and I knelt in front of the chair because standing over him would have made him get up. “Let me see your side.”

“Scratches.”

“Rieck.”

“Aurelia.” He caught my wrist before the cloth reached him. Not hard. He never held me hard. “I’ve had worse from my own father.”

“Please,” I said.

He let go of my wrist and looked away, and that was as close to yes as I was going to get, so I started with

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

his face because it was the only part of him he had left uncovered.

didn’t speak for a long time. And neither did I.

“Say it,” he said finally.

“Say what?”

“Whatever you’ve been holding since the car.”

I dipped the cloth. My hands were still not steady.

“The baby is yours.”

His eyes came to mine.

“Aurelia…”

“It is. I have said it every day for two weeks and I will keep saying it.” My voice cracked in the middle and I let it. “You are my husband. I was with you. The timing works, I have counted it a hundred times, I have counted it in the middle of the night until I wanted to be sick. It is yours.”

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