Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 178

Chp 178; Permission Granted.

Rock’s POV

She had started locking the east sitting room.

That was the fourth thing. I had been counting them, the way I count everything, and by Friday morning the list was long enough that I could no longer pretend it was nothing.

One. She left the house three times in five days and came back with her eyes red and her chin up.

Two. She stopped asking Ronan to drive her.

Three. She ate at the table again, properly, for the first time in a month, which told me she had decided something and had stopped being sick over it.

Four. The door.

“Marta.”

“Yes, Alpha.”

“Who has the key to the east sitting room?”

Marta looked at the floor. Nine years in this house and she had never once looked at the floor when I spoke to her.

“Mrs. Valerius asked me not to say.”

“That’s an answer.”

“Yes, Alpha.” Her mouth twitched. “I suppose it is.”

I waited until the car was out of the gate on Friday afternoon before I went upstairs.

And before you judge me I want you to know that I knew exactly what I was doing.

I had spent a year learning what my not saying anything cost that woman, and I walked into her room anyway and started opening drawers, and I didn’t stop.

Fortunately it wasn’t hidden well. It was under two folded sweaters at the bottom of the wardrobe, in a plain black case, heavy enough that I felt the weight of it in my wrist before I had it open.

Sitting down on the edge of her bed, I read for an hour and a half.

The will came first. Derek Ashford. Last will and testament. Forty percent of every holding registered under the Valerius name, to his daughter, in trust until her twenty-fifth year.

Witnessed. Sealed. Stamped by a court that still exists.

I read it three times because the first two times my eyes went across the words without letting them in.

13:01 Wed, Sep 30 F ·

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Forty percent.

Roia claim. NoLa grievance a clever lawyer could dress up. A registered will, filed in a real courthouse, by a man who had died in a way I already knew far too much about.

Then the rest.

Transfer documents. Nine years of them, tabbed in her small neat handwriting, each one matched to a page in the estate register. A holding company that existed for four months and swallowed six properties. A signature repeated over and over across a decade.

When I was finally done. I put the page down on my wife’s bed and sat very still, and the cold came up through me the way it does when the animal wakes before the man has finished thinking.

My family has been living on stolen ground since before I could shave.

Every tower. Every board seat. Every argument I had ever had with my father about what was owed to whom. Dawson holding the empire, me fighting him for it, Hebvron drafting contracts about heirs and inheritance, all of us standing on top of a dead man’s daughter and calling it a dynasty.

And she had known for weeks. She had built this on the floor of a locked room, alone, four hundred pages deep, and had not asked one single person in this house for help because we are the people who took it.

Closing the case, I put the sweaters back exactly as they had been and I went downstairs and stood at the glass for a long time without seeing anything through it.

The call came at ten past eleven the next morning.

“Elara. I said no calls.”

“Alpha.” My assistant didn’t move from the doorway. “It’s the Bureau of Corporate Affairs. The Director herself, not an office.”

Without thinking I picked up.

“Valerius.”

“Mr. Valerius. My name is Director Okoye.” A woman’s voice, dry, unhurried, the voice of somebody who has spent thirty years being unimpressed by rich men. “Thank you for taking the call. I imagine you are busy.”

“Say what you called to say.”

“Four days ago your wife walked into my building with four hundred and six pages of evidence against Valerius Group and against Dawson Valerius personally.”

I said nothing.

“We have verified all of it,” she said. “Independently. Two teams, no contact between them. The will is authentic and it is registered. The death certificate is authentic. Eleven signatures across nine years of filings were made by a man who has been dead since before the earliest of them.”

Wed, Sep 30

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“You are sure?”

Mr. Valerius, I have been doing this since before you owned a company. I’m not sure about very much.” There was a small pause. “But I’m sure about this.”

I got up and went to the window.

“Then why am I on this telephone, Director? You have your evidence. Go and do your job.”

“Because of what happens when I do.” Her tone didn’t change. “This isn’t a small firm. This touches four boards, two ministries, and a family that half this city is frightened to say out loud in a lift. If I move on Monday, I freeze assets that men in your position have been treating as their own for a decade. Yours included, in three cases.”

“Mine?”

“Three properties currently under Rooffe Construction were transferred out of the estate in 2013 on a forged signature.” She let that sit. “I’m not accusing you of anything. You were a young man and somebody handed you a portfolio. But when I move, you lose them, and you lose them publicly.”

“So you want my permission?”

“I want to know whether the Northern Faction is going to come down on this office like weather.” Okoye’s voice sharpened for the first time. “I have four investigators with families, Mr. Valerius. I’m not sending them at your name in the dark. If your house intends to fight this, I would rather know today than on Monday morning.”

I looked out at the city.

Valerius Tower stood up out of the middle of it, the tallest thing for miles, the shape I had grown up being told was the family’s whole achievement.

Built with her money. Named for the men who took it.

“Does she know you called me?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell her.”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

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