Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 180

Chp 180: The Chair By The Window.

Aurelia’s POV

His face was on my television at seven in the morning.

I was standing in the kitchen with a glass of water in my hand and Marta was talking about something, eggs, I think, and then the picture cut to the front of Valerius Tower and I didn’t hear another word she said.

‘Breaking. Board dissolved. Bureau investigators in control.

Then the footage. Dawson coming out of that building between two men in plain suits, no coat, no white jacket, no cigarette, walking fast with his chin up while forty cameras went off in his face.

“Child.” Marta had stopped moving. “Is that…”

“Turn it up.”

“Sources confirm Mr. Valerius is being held for questioning in relation to nine years of alleged corporate fraud, forged transfers, and the unlawful seizure of estate assets,” the woman said. “Legal analysts we have spoken to this morning say that if these charges reach court and stick, he is looking at decades.”

I sat down slowly on the kitchen stool.

I had waited two years for this. I had signed a contract, married a stranger, walked into a government building alone with four hundred pages, and here it was, on the screen, exactly the way I had wanted it.

And I felt nothing.

Not nothing, exactly. Something worse than nothing. Something flat and grey and empty, like a room after the furniture has gone.

“You are not smiling,” Marta said quietly.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” I put the glass down because my hand had started shaking. “I thought I would. I have

I thought about this for so long, Marta. I used to fall asleep imagining his face. And now I have seen his face , and I just feel…”

“Ah.” Marta came round the counter and put her warm hand flat on my back, and didn’t say anything clever, which is why I have always loved her.

“He drugged me,” I said. “Two and a half years, my own vitamins, in my own kitchen. He took my father’s house. He put his name on my whole life.”

“He did.”

“So why doesn’t it feel like enough?”

13:01 Wed, Sep 30 F·

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“Because it never does, child.” She rubbed once between my shoulders and moved away to the stove. “Hating a man is work. It fills the whole day. And when he is gone you still have all those hours and nothing left to put in them.”

I found Rieck in his study with paper spread across the whole desk.

“You’ve seen it,” he said, without looking up.

“The entire country has seen it.”

“Mm.”

I stood in the doorway for a moment and stared at him. Pen moving. Eyes down. That easy, terrible stillness he wears when he doesn’t want to be readable.

“Rieck.”

“Aurelia.”

“Did you have anything to do with it?”

The pen didn’t stop.

“With what?”

“You know what.” I came into the room. “The Bureau moved in five days. Just five. Nothing in this city moves in five days unless somebody expensive lifts a telephone.”

“You gave them evidence.” He turned a page. “Good evidence, apparently.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

He put the pen down then and finally looked up, and his face was perfectly calm and perfectly empty.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”

I looked at him for a long moment and somehow knew he was lying.

I didn’t know how I knew. There was no tell, no flicker, nothing a person could point at in court. But I have been married to this man for a year and I have learned the exact kind of his silences, and that one had a wall behind it.

“All right,” I said.

“All right?”

“I said all right, Rieck.”

He watched me leave. I felt it the whole way down the hallway.

(

15:01 Wed, Sep 30 )

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

They put a security pass in my hand at eight the next morning and I walked into that building through the front doors.

I had come into that lobby a hundred times as somebody’s wife. Head down, coat over my arm, waiting on a leather bench while the men upstairs finished being important.

Nobody was sitting on the bench now.

Forty people in that lobby and every single one of them turned to look, and not one of them knew what to do with their face.

“Mrs. Valerius.” A young woman from legal, hurrying, holding a tablet against her chest like a shield. “The floor is expecting you. Some of them, anyway.”

“Good.”

The executive floor smelled of paper and fear.

I didn’t sit in Dawson’s chair. I had them take it out of the room entirely and bring in a plain one from the meeting suite, and then I had them bring the executives in one at a time.

“Mr. Hargrove.”

“Mrs. Valerius.” He was sweating through his collar. “I want to say first that I fully supported the board’s decision to…”

“You supported it on Tuesday morning.” I looked at the file in front of me. “You signed the 2019 filing. You signed the 2021 filing. You sat in nine annual meetings and put your name under a page that said a dead man had transferred six properties.”

“I didn’t know.”

“That’s worse, not better.” I closed the file. “You are relieved of your position. Security will take you down.”

It went on until four.

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