Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 181

Chp 181; Ask Me Why.

Aurelia’s POV

When I walked in, someone was sitting in the chair by the window, back to the door, one hand resting on the arm of it.

Then they turned around.

“You.”

That was all I had. One word, and then I laughed, because the other thing was screaming/

“Hello, Ri.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Please…”

“Charlotte.” I stayed by the door with my coat still over my arm. “You are sitting in my chair, in my house, four days after your name went out of this city with a warning attached to it. Whatever you came here for. no. Get out.”

“I need your help.”

I actually had to put a hand on the doorframe.

“Say that again.”

“I need your help, Ri.”

“My help?” My voice came out very strange. “You want help? From me?”

“There’s nobody else.”

“There’s a whole city of people, Charlotte. You have spent six years collecting them.” I picked my bag back up off the floor. “Go and be somebody else’s emergency. I have had a long day and I’m so done with all of you. So I…”

“He took my son.”

“What?”

“Dawson.” She stood up out of the chair, and I saw her properly for the first time. Her hair was pulled back flat. She had no jewellery on at all. Her face was raw and scrubbed and puffed under the eyes, and Charlotte has never in her life let anyone see her without a face on. “He took him out of my arms in a hospital corridor when he was two hours old. I have not held him since. Not once. Not for a minute.”

“You are lying.”

“I’m not. I swear.”

“You always lie. It’s the only thing about you I have ever been sure of.”

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“I know.” Her chin was shaking. “I know that. And I’m still standing here.”

that momentthe room had gone very quiet. Somewhere down the hallway I could hear Marta not moving, which is its own kind of sound.

“Why?” I finally asked.

“What?”

“Dawson wanted that baby more than he ever wanted me.” I put the bag down again. “He spent two and a half years drugging me so that you could give it to him. So why would he take a newborn boy off his own mother and throw her out of the country? Give me one reason that makes sense.”

Charlotte didn’t answer.

“Charlotte.”

Still nothing. She just looked at the carpet.

“Say it,” I said.

“He is not the father.”

I met her the next afternoon in a bad café on the west side, forty minutes from anywhere either of us was

known.

She was there first, in the corner, in a grey coat I wouldn’t have looked at twice on a stranger.

“His name is Adrian.” She had her hands around a cup she wasn’t drinking. “Adrian Cole. I was with him for two years before Dawson. He fixed cars, Ri. He had nothing. He was funny and he was kind and my mother couldn’t stand him.”

“And?”

“And I left him for a man with a helicopter.” She smiled at the table, awful. “Then I found out I was pregnant, and I did the math, and I knew exactly whose it was, and I told Dawson it was his.”

“So you knew from the start?”

“From the first week.”

“You let him tell me at our anniversary.” My voice was flat, which frightened me more than shouting would have. “You stood in that garden with your hand on your stomach while he told me I was barren, and you knew it wasn’t even his.”

“Yes.”

“Say the rest.”

“I let you think you were broken,” she continued. “I let you believe it for two years. I sat with you when you cried about it and I held your hand and I let you believe it, because if you believed it then nobody was looking at me.”

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

Suddenly I got up.

please…”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Please sit down.”

I stood there with my hand on the back of the chair for whrat felt like a long time.

“I am not going to tell you it’s all right,” I said. “It will never be all right. There is no sentence you can say to me that fixes one single day of what you took.”

“I know.”

“But I’m asking you one question, and you are going to answer it honestly, and if you lie to me I will know.” I sat back down. “What do you actually want? Money? The name? A way back into that house?”

Charlotte looked up at me, and for once there was nothing in her face at all. No sugar. No poison. Nothing.

“I want to hold my son,” she said. “That’s it. That’s the whole list. I will get on a plane the same hour and go somewhere with one road and no telephone and clean other people’s houses for the rest of my life. I just want him with me.”

I thought about the basket by the window in that cold office.

I thought about a man who wouldn’t turn his head to look at a four-week-old boy.

He doesn’t want that child. He’s keeping him because Charlotte wants him. That’s the only reason.

“Where is he right now?”

“With a woman called Miss Reyes.” Her voice cracked with relief that I had asked anything at all. “Dawson’s secretary. She has him at the apartment. There are men on the door.”

“And Dawson is sitting in a Bureau interview room with no phone and no lawyer he trusts?”

“Yes.”

I let out a breath.

“Then he will never have less control of that house than he does this week,” I said. “God help me, Charlotte.”

I worked at the desk in my own room that night with the door shut.

Floor plan of the apartment, drawn from memory, and I found I remembered it better than I wanted to.

Two lifts, one service. Guards on eight-hour shifts, which meant two changeovers a day and a nine-minute gap at each one when the outgoing men signed the log downstairs.

Miss Reyes has three children of her own. That was worth something. A woman with three of her own

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