Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 176

Chp 176: My Own Way.

She left the door open behind her, and that was somehow the worst part.

Dawson stood at the window with his back to the room for a long time after her footsteps had gone.

Forty percent. She had said the number out loud in his own office, in his own building, standing over his own desk, and she had said it the way a woman says a thing she has already checked twice.

Four people had ever known what was in Derek’s will. Two of them were dead. The third had shredded the paper himself, in a locked room, three months ago, with nobody standing behind him.

That left one.

“Vance.”

His fixer appeared in the doorway inside four seconds.

“Sir.”

“Kaelen.”

“What about him?”

“He sat across a table from me.” Dawson still hadn’t turned around. “He held that will over my head like a knife and I gave him exactly what he asked for. Silence. He keeps the girl’s inheritance buried, I keep out of his mountains. That was the whole arrangement. Two sentences. A child could have honoured it.”

“So you think he told her?”

“I think she walked in here this morning and recited it back to me line by line.” Dawson finally turned. His face hadn’t moved at all, which was how Vance knew how bad it was. “The police record. The order with my grandfather’s name on it. The forty percent. Who else, Vance? Who else on this earth is holding that document?”

“Nobody, sir.”

“Nobody.” He crossed to the desk and picked up his glass and put it down again without drinking. “Do you know what he wanted from me in exchange for his silence? Advice. On women. He sat there and asked me how to win her, and I gave him an honest answer, and I have been laughing about it for weeks.”

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“Sir…”

“I was the joke. The entire time, I was the joke.”

“Then we go and take it out of him.”

“Yes.” Dawson straightened his cuff. “Except that nobody has laid eyes on him in six days. He has taken two hundred men and gone into a hole in the ground and there is not one hand I can put on him anywhere in this country.”

Vance said nothing.

13:01 Wed, Sep 30 F.

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“Find him,” Dawson said. “I don’t care what it costs. I want him found this week.”

They found him on the fourth night.

“Borderlands.” The analyst put the map down on the table, and eleven men leaned in around it. “Old mining station, disused since before either of us was born. Two miles east of the river line, cut into the rock. No road in that shows on any survey.”

“How sure are you?”

“Nine men bought bread in the village below on Tuesday and paid in northern coin.” He tapped the spot twice. “Nobody pays in northern coin down there. Nobody.”

“Numbers?”

“Forty, maybe fifty on site. The rest are scattered. He split them after the narrows.”

Dawson looked at the map for eleven seconds.

“Twenty men,” he said. “Rifles. Two cars, no lights, we go in at midnight.”

“Sir.” Vance kept his voice calm. “He is an Alpha King with fifty fighters in a hole he chose himself.”

“I know.”

“Twenty men is not enough to take him.”

“I’m not going there to take him.” Dawson reached for his coat. “I’m going there to look him in the face while I ask him one question. If I like the answer, we all drive home. If I don’t, I will burn that hole out from the top and stand on it.”

The mining station smelled of wet stone and old iron.

They took him at the mouth of it, or thought they had, twenty rifles up in the dark, and then the dark moved and Dawson understood that there were men in the rocks above them who had been there the

whole time.

“Well,” a voice said, “Look what the river dragged up.”

Kaelen came out of the tunnel with his coat open and his left shoulder bound in white, unarmed, entirely

at ease.

“Put those down before somebody’s hand slips.”

“Nobody is putting anything down,” Dawson said.

“Your call.” Kaelen shrugged with one shoulder, the good one. “But my people are behind yours, and yours are looking the wrong way, and I haven’t decided yet whether tonight is going to be a conversation or a mess.”

3:01 Wed, Sep 30 F.

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Dawson didn’t look behind him. He wouldn’t give the man that.

bu told her.”

“Told who what?”

“Aurelia.” He stepped forward. “She came into my office three mornings ago and put my grandfather’s name on a table in front of me. She knows about the will. All of it. The forty percent, the police record, the file I destroyed.”

Kaelen’s face changed.

Not into guilt. Into something quieter and far more interesting.

“No,” he said.

“You are the only man alive holding that document.”

“Yes.” Kaelen came closer, and the temperature came with him, that mountain cold rolling off the man like something he couldn’t switch off. “And I haven’t shown it to her. Not one page. Do you know why?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Because the day she reads it, she doesn’t need me anymore.” He said it without shame, plainly, the way he said everything. “I want that woman to choose me. Not owe me. That paper is the only thing I have that she can’t get anywhere else, and I have been sitting on it like a dragon because it is the last card in my

hand.”

Dawson studied him.

He had spent twenty years reading men across tables, and he knew the truth when it came at him ugly and unflattering and against a man’s own interest. That wasn’t a lie. No one invents a story that makes him look that small.

“Then who,” Dawson said slowly.

“That’s the correct question.” Kaelen nodded. “Somebody put six of my men in the dirt on that ridge and turned his back on Rieck Valerius afterwards. Somebody has been reading files that were buried in three different vaults. It’s not me and it’s not you, and I would very much like to know who it is before he decides which of us he doesn’t need.”

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“You want something.”

“I want an alliance.”

Dawson laughed out loud.

“I’m serious,” Kaelen said. “You have lost the girl, the will, and half your name in this city. I have lost six men and the high ground. Whoever this is, he has taken pieces off both of us in the same fortnight, and he hasn’t shown his face once.” He held out his good hand. “Together we are a wall. Apart we are two men getting picked off in the dark, one at a time, and I know which of us he starts with.”

Dawson looked at the offered hand for a long moment.

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