Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 179

Chp 179; Resign Or Rot.

lilies hit him before he had the door fully open.

Dawson stopped in his own hallway with his key still in his hand and stood there breathing that sweet dead smell, and every single thing about his day got worse at once.

She was in the middle of his living room.

“Hello, Dawson.”

“How did you get in here?”

“The side gate code.” Charlotte’s chin came up. Her eyes were already wet and she hadn’t said ten words. “You never changed it. Six years and you never once changed it.”

“How long have you been in this country?”

“Nine days.”

“Nine days?” He set the key down very slowly on the console table, because his hand wanted to do something else with it. “Vance put you on a plane with my money in your bag and my word in your ear. and you have been sitting in this city for nine days.”

“I couldn’t do it.”

“You could. You just chose not to.”

“He is four weeks old!” Her voice broke straight down the middle and she didn’t care who heard it. “Four weeks, Dawson. I haven’t held him since a nurse took him out of my arms in a corridor and gave me two minutes. Two!”

“You should have counted better things.”

“Please.” She came towards him with both hands out. “One hour. You can stand in the room. You can have twelve men in the room, I don’t care, I just want to hold my son for one hour and then I will get back on a plane and you will never hear my name again for the rest of your life.”

He suddenly caught her by the arm so strong that she went quiet immediately.

“Listen to me,” he muttered. “Because I am going to say this once and then I am going to go upstairs and have a drink.”

“Dawson…”

“You lied to my face for eleven months. In my house. In my bed. You sat across from me at dinner and looked me in the eye and lied, over and over, for the better part of a year.” His voice didn’t rise at all. “And when I found out, I didn’t do what a man in my position is expected to do. I put you in a car.”

“You threw me out of the country.”

“I let you breathe.” He brought her in half a step. “That’s the whole of it, Charlotte. You are standing in my hallway tonight because I made up my mind, on one particular morning, that I could live with letting you

13:01 Wed, Sep 30 F.

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

walk. So don’t make me revisit that decision, because I promise you I’m in the mood.”

mouth was shaking. “He needs his mother.”

“He needs nothing from you.”

“Dawson…”

“He has a house, a name, a woman who is paid very well to hold him, and a father.” He let go of her arm and stepped back and straightened his cuff. “What he doesn’t need is a whore in the nursery teaching him

how to lie.”

With that she hit him.

Open hand, across the face, hard enough that his head turned with it, and for one long second neither of them moved.

Dawson touched his own cheek and started to laugh.

“There she is,” he said. “There’s the girl I remember.”

“I hate you.”

“Yes.” He opened the front door for her, polite, holding it wide the way he had held a hundred doors for her when there were photographers outside. “The car is still at the kerb. Don’t come back to this city, Charlotte. I won’t be this generous twice.”

She stood in the doorway with tears running down her ruined face and looked past him, up the stairs, towards a room she had never seen and a child she had held for two minutes.

Then she walked out.

1

The call came at nine the next morning.

“Sir.” His secretary, breathless. “Headquarters. They want you now.”

“Who does?”

“The board, sir. All of them. It’s an emergency session.”

He wasn’t exactly worried in the car. He had walked into eleven emergency sessions in six years and walked out of all of them holding more than he came in with.

But the moment he opened the boardroom door, he knew in under a second that this was different.

Fourteen people around that table and not one of them stood up.

“Well,” Dawson said. “This is cozy.”

“Sit down, Dawson.”

“I’ll stand.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Somebody say the sentence you have all clearly agreed on in

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

the corridor.”

Hargrove, three chairs down, who had been Dawson’s own appointment. “We are asking for your resignation. Effective this morning.”

“No.”

“Dawson…”

“No.” He smiled around the table. “Was there a second item? I have a busy day.”

“The Bureau froze eleven accounts at six o’clock this morning,” Hargrove said. “Eleven. Including the operating account this company uses to pay four thousand people on Friday. Do you understand what have been doing since dawn?”

“I understand you are frightened.”

“I am terrified, and so should you be.”

“You don’t have the votes to remove me.” Dawson leaned both hands on the back of an empty chair. “Not one of you does. I built this. I have carried every one of you through two recessions and a hostile bid, and if you think a frozen account and a bad morning gives you the standing to…”

“They don’t need the votes, Mr. Valerius.”

The voice came from the doorway.

She was small, grey-haired, in a plain brown coat, and she walked into the room like a woman who had been in a hundred rooms exactly like it.

“Who are you?”

“Director Okoye. Bureau of Corporate Affairs, compliance division.” She set a slim folder on the end of the table. “You may sit or stand. It makes no difference to me at all.”

The room had gone completely quiet.

Dawson knew the name. Of course he knew the name. Everyone at that table knew the name, and two of them had gone the colour of paper.

“Director.” He made his voice pleasant. “You have frozen a payroll account belonging to four thousand innocent people. I imagine you would like to explain that.”

“I would like to explain your options instead. And there are just two.” She didn’t open the folder. “The first is that you resign this morning, cooperate fully, and let this office recover what was taken. If you do that, your lawyers will have something to work with.”

“And the second?”

“You don’t.” Okoye looked at him for the first time. “And I put every one of those nine years in front of a court, and you spend the next several decades explaining to a judge how a dead man signed eleven documents.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify