Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 175

Chp 175: What is Mine.

boy was born at four in the morning, and Dawson wasn’t in the room for it.

He waited in the corridor with a cigarette he didn’t light, listening to a woman he had once wanted scream herself hoarse behind a door, and when the nurse finally came out and said the words healthy boy, he felt exactly nothing.

“Seven pounds, sir. Strong lungs. She did very well.”

“Good.”

“Would you like to see her?”

“No.”

He went in an hour later, when Charlotte was asleep, and looked at the thing in the plastic cot beside her bed.

Dark hair. Screwed-up little face. Ten fingers.

It looked like Adrian Cole.

“Vance.”

“Sir.”

“Tell her this morning. Before they discharge her.”

“Tell her what, exactly?”

“That she leaves the city today.” Dawson put his hands in his pockets. “That she won’t come back. Not next month, not in ten years, not for a funeral. And that if she is ever seen inside these city limits again, she won’t be seen for very long after.”

Vance didn’t blink. “And the boy?”

“The boy stays.”

She went quietly.

That was the part Dawson hadn’t expected, and it sat badly with him all through the morning.

Vance came back before ten and said she had cried, and packed, and asked for four minutes with the child, and been given two, and had then walked out to the car without one word of argument.

No screaming. No threats. Nothing.

“She said one thing, sir.”

“Say it.”

100 Wed, Sep su

Billionaire’s Betrayal. a contracted revenge

“She said, tell him I understand.” Vance’s face gave away nothing. “That was all.”

noon the boy was in his office, in a padded basket on the low table by the window, and Dawson was trying to read a shipping report.

Then it started crying.

“Stop that.”

It didn’t stop.

“There’s nothing wrong with you.” Dawson put the report down. “You have been fed. You are dry. I have it on excellent authority that you are, in fact, perfectly comfortable.”

The crying grew louder.

He got up. He circled the basket twice like a man approaching a dog he didn’t trust, then reached in and picked the boy up, both hands, holding him out slightly in front of himself.

Then the screaming was over the roof.

“Right.” He tried tucking him against his chest, which made it worse. He tried the other arm. Worse again. The small red face went purple and the small fists shook, and Dawson, who had once talked a hostile board out of a nine-figure claim in forty minutes, stood in the middle of his own office and found he had absolutely nothing.

“Sir.”

The guard at the door had gone red himself.

“What.”

“Forgive me, sir.” The man swallowed. “But he wants his mother. That’s all that is. They know the smell of her at that age. They can’t help it.”

The room went cold.

“Say that again.”

“Nothing, sir.”

“No, you were very keen a moment ago.” Dawson’s voice didn’t rise. It never had to. “You were about to suggest I put him in a car and drive him to the woman who lied to my face for eleven months. Were you?”

“No, sir.”

“Because she is his mother?”

“Sir, I only meant…”

“His mother made her choice.” Dawson set the boy back down in the basket, still screaming, and straightened his cuffs. “She is not coming back. Not for him. Not for anything. He will get used to that, the way the rest of us did.”

13:00 Wed, Sep 30 F ·

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

He crossed to the door and opened it.

end Miss Reyes up. She has three children of her own, she can hold him and answer the phones at the same time. And you,” he said, without turning around, “will not offer me parenting advice again.”

The briefing came at four.

1

“Say it plainly,” Dawson said. “I’ve had a day.”

“The narrows.” His investigator laid the photographs out one at a time. “Two nights ago. Valerius took roughly ninety men up the eastern pass. Kaelen was waiting for him with two hundred, dug in on the high ground.”

“Then it wasn’t a battle. It was a slaughter.”

“That’s what it should have been.” The man tapped the third photograph. “Kaelen had him. Ninety percent of the way to finished. Valerius was down twice, his line was folding, and it was over.”

“But?”

“Someone opened fire from the ridge.”

Dawson sat forward.

“Say more.”

“Seven shots. Six men down, all Kaelen’s. The seventh caught Kaelen in the shoulder and he called the retreat inside a minute.” The investigator turned the last photograph around. A hillside. Nothing on it. “He has gone to ground since. Whole force, off the mountain, out of the villa, gone. Nobody has seen him in forty hours.”

“Kaelen is hiding.”

“Kaelen is waiting. There’s a difference, and I don’t know which one this is.”

Dawson looked at the empty hillside for a long moment.

Seven shots. Not thirty. Not a volley. Seven, from distance, in the dark, and only one of them fatal- adjacent, and that one placed in a shoulder rather than a skull.

“That wasn’t Rieck’s man,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Rieck Valerius doesn’t own a rifle he would use like that. If Rieck had a shooter on that ridge, Kaelen would be in the ground, not underground.” Dawson pushed the photograph back across the desk. “Somebody else was on that mountain. Somebody who wanted Kaelen stopped and didn’t want him dead.”

“That’s a very small target to hit.”

“Yes.” He reached for his glass. “It is.”

་་་སད པ་་

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

came at nine the next morning, and she didn’t wait to be announced.

“Aurelia.” He didn’t stand. “You’ve put on colour. Married life clearly suits you better the second time.”

“Don’t.”

“That’s a very short greeting for a woman who has walked past four of my men to get in here.”

She had her chin up and her whole body set like she had rehearsed this in the car. He could see the shape of the speech coming.

Then she stopped.

Her eyes had gone past his shoulder, to the low table by the window, and everything she had come in carrying went straight out of her face.

The basket. The small sleeping shape in it.

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