Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 177

Chp 177: Everything Is In There.

Aurelia’s POV

I couldn’t stop seeing that baby’s face.

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All the way home, all through dinner, all through a night I spent staring at the ceiling with Ricck sleeping three feet away and a whole country between us..

Dark hair. A little dip in the chin.

Dawson could have said a hundred things. He could have laughed at me. He could have told me it was cousin’s, a friend’s, an employee’s. But he chose the one answer that told me nothing, and he chose it fast, and Dawson Valerius has never once in his life been fast about anything he didn’t care about.

I got up at two and sat by the window with my hands over my stomach and put it together piece by piece

Charlotte was pregnant. Charlotte was due around now.

And now she was nowhere.

Not gone quiet. Gone completely. No photographs, no restaurant sightings, nobody in that whole

gossiping city saying her name. A woman like Charlotte doesn’t deliver a Valerius heir and then go quiet. A woman like Charlotte would have hired a photographer for the hospital corridor.

“So that’s her son. And she’s not with him.”

That was the first thing.

The second thing came slower, and it came from the way Dawson had turned his chair. Not to block the baby from me.

To block himself from having to look at it.

I had seen that man hold things he wanted. His hand on a car door. His hand on my waist at a gala when a camera was pointed at us. He wore the things he owned. And he had a newborn son eight feet away and he had not once looked at him, not while I stood there, not for a single second.

“He is not the father.”

I had no proof. Not a page, not a test, nothing. Just a cold room and a man who wouldn’t turn his head.

But I have been wrong about Dawson exactly once in my life, and it cost me two years and my whole heart, and I haven’t been wrong about him since.

There’s something buried under that child and I would dig it up.

But not tonight. Tonight I had my own hole to dig.

I worked for two days straight on the floor of the small east sitting room, with the door locked.

13:01 Wed, Sep 30 F.

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Everything came out. The copy of my father’s will. The police record with a dead man’s order on it. Nine years of Valerius Group filings I had been quietly pulling since the week I signed my contract, back when I

ly wanted to hurt Dawson and had no idea I was already standing on top of the reason why.

I laid it out in rows across the carpet.

Transfer, 2011. Transfer, 2013. A holding company that existed for four months, took ownership of six properties, and dissolved.

And on every single one, the same signature.

Derek Ashford. My father’s name, signed eleven times, in four different hands, over nine years.

I sat back on my heels in the middle of that carpet and felt something in me go very quiet and very cold.

They had not just stolen from me. They had used him. They had kept his dead hand moving across paper for nearly a decade because it was cheaper than a lawyer.

“Marta”, I thought. “If I start crying now I won’t stop, and I have work to do.”

I put it in order instead. Will first. Death record second. Then the forgeries, dated, tabbed, cross- referenced against the estate register, every stolen property matched to the page that stole it.

By Thursday night it was four hundred and six pages thick, and it was the cleanest, coldest, most patient thing I have ever built.

“You’re up early.”

I turned from the mirror. Rieck stood in the bedroom doorway with his shoulder against the frame, looking at me pin my hair back.

“So are you.”

“You’re dressed.” His eyes went down and back up. Grey suit. Flat shoes. The good coat. “Properly dressed.”

“I own clothes, Rieck.”

“You’ve worn nothing but soft things for three weeks.” He came further into the room, and I got the sandalwood and the cold rain of him before he was halfway across it. “Where are you going?”

“The doctor.”

“You went on Tuesday.”

“A different one. For the blood work. They want it done every two weeks now.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“You have the yard at eight.”

“The yard can wait.”

3/4

ISU wea, Sep 30

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“Rieck.” I turned around and made myself look right at him, because a woman who looks away is a woman who is lying, and I have learned that lesson from professionals. “It’s a needle and a waiting room. I would

her do it alone. Please.”

He was quiet for a second too long.

“You’re doing something,” he said.

“I’m going to a doctor.”

“You have that look. The one you had the morning you took the drive out of Dawson’s vault.”

I picked up my bag.

“Then trust me,” I said. “Once. Today.”

Something crossed his face that I couldn’t name. Then he stepped aside from the door and let me go past him, and just as I reached the hallway his hand caught my elbow, lightly, barely there.

“Aurelia.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is.” His voice had dropped. “You come home tonight. You come home and you tell me. That’s

all I want.”

I didn’t answer him, because I couldn’t, and I went down the stairs with my four hundred pages in a plain black case and my heart throbbing like crazy in my chest.

The Office of Corporate Regulation smelled of dust and old coffee, and I sat on a plastic chair for fifty minutes with the case flat on my knees.

“Mrs. Valerius?” A woman in her fifties, reading glasses pushed up into grey hair. “I’m Director Okoye. You asked for the compliance division specifically. Most people don’t know we exist.”

“I know exactly what your division does.”

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