Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 183

Chp 183: If It Isn’t The Bitch.

Aurelia’s POV

Charlotte did exactly one thing right that night.

She walked up to the front desk at two minutes past midnight, in a red coat, and said Dawson’s name.

And that was enough.

I watched from the service entrance as both guards came off the wall at once, because Charlotte is blonde and loud and wearing a colour that costs more than their monthly salary, and she was crying, or doing very good impression of it, and men in lobbies don’t know what to do with crying women in expensive coats at midnight.

“I need to see my son,” she said. “Please. He’s sick. Someone called me and said he was sick.”

“Ma’am, you are not on the approved…”

“I don’t care what list I’m on.” Her voice grew louder. “That’s my baby and I’m his mother, and if something happens to him tonight because you kept me standing in this lobby, I will have your name in every newspaper in this country by Friday.”

Just then both guards moved towards her.

And I, on the other hand, went through the service door.

The back stairwell smelled of cleaning products and old carpet.

Seventh floor.

I had walked those stairs a hundred times before, with shopping and dry cleaning and once, a wine rack that wouldn’t fit in the lift.

I went up without a torch because I knew the shape of those stairs in the dark.

Miss Reyes answered on the second knock.

She was a small woman, fifty, in a dressing gown, and she looked at me for one full second in the doorway.

“Mrs. Valerius.”

“Miss Reyes.” I kept my voice low. “I think you know why I’m here.”

She said nothing.

“He’s in a Bureau holding room,” I said. “He can’t call you, he can’t fire you, he can’t do one single thing to you tonight. I need you to think carefully about what you owe a man like that.”

She looked at me for a long time before she stepped back and let me in.

30 O

13:02 Wed, Sep 30 F ·

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

The baby was at the end of the hallway, in a cot by the window, with a white noise machine running beside Shim.

I picked him up the way you pick up a borrowed thing, slowly, with two hands, and he made a small sound and settled. And I stood there in the half dark with somebody else’s child against my chest and felt something go very tight in my throat.

He smelled of milk and absolutely nothing wrong.

I carried him down in the service lift and Charlotte was already at the back of the building, exactly where I

had told her to be.

She saw him from twenty feet, but she didn’t run. I think her legs stopped working.

She covered maybe half the space and then just stopped, and I crossed the rest of it and put him in her

arms.

To my surprise she didn’t cry. She pressed her face into the top of his head and went completely still, and I looked away, because some things aren’t mine to watch.

“You need to go,” I said. “The car is on Lennon Street. He will take you to the hotel and you don’t open that door for anyone but me.”

“Ri.”

“Not now. Go.”

“Thank you,” she said, into the baby’s hair.

“Go, Charlotte.”

She went.

I looked until she turned the first corner. Then I pulled my hood up and took the longer route east, down the service alley that runs behind the building and out onto the back street.

The alley was dark and empty and smelled of wet stone.

I was fifteen steps from the end of it when the arm came.

Quick. Impossibly quick. One second there was nothing and then something closed around me from behind and lifted me clean off the ground, and I opened my mouth and a hand covered it before the sound got out.

My elbow found a ribcage. My heel found a shin. But nothing moved.

‘Whatever is holding you,’ some quiet part of me said, ‘it is not entirely human.’

The grip didn’t tighten. It just held, the way something holds when it doesn’t need to try, and then cloth pressed over my eyes and the alley went black and I stopped fighting because there was nothing left to fight against.

The last thing I smelled before the dark wasn’t a person.

13:02 Wed, Sep 30 F·

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

It was something old. Something I couldn’t name. Something that pulled the hairs off the back of my neck before I could even think about it.

Then nothing.

I woke up on a concrete floor that was cold and hard.

The kind of cold that lives in stone and crawls up through your joints before your eyes are fully open.

I lay still first, the way Rieck had once told me to, after the mercenaries, after the room I didn’t know. ‘Before you move, listen.’

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