Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 184

Chp 184: The Call.

Rick’s POV

Nine o’clock came and went and she wasn’t back.

I told myself it meant nothing because she had gone out before without telling me and came back with four hundred pages that brought down an empire..

Whatever she was doing tonight, she was doing it on purpose and she was doing it well, and I wasn’t her keeper.

I picked up my phone and then put it down.

‘She will be back.”‘

I poured a drink I didn’t want and stood at the glass wall and just stared at the city below, all those lit windows, all those people who had no idea what moved through their streets at night, what bled and hunted and held its territory in the dark between their clean office buildings.

And somewhere out there, my wife wasn’t answering a phone she had left charging on the bedroom table.

I had seen it at eight and I had walked past it three times since.

At ten past nine I poured the drink down the sink because I wasn’t going to stand here getting calm on scotch like Dawson Valerius.

Then the front door opened.

I turned around.

“Where the hell have you…”

It wasn’t Aurelia.

Charlotte was standing in my doorway with both arms wrapped around a baby, no coat, hair loose and wild, one shoe scuffed at the toe like she had been running.

We stared at each other for a full second.

“Get out of my house,” I said.

“I need to see Aurelia.” Her voice was wrong. Too weak. “Where is she?”

“She’s out. Leave.”

“Where out?” She took another step in and her eyes were already moving around the room. “What time did she leave? Did she tell you where she was going?”

“I’m not discussing my wife with you. Get out.”

“Rieck.” She said my name like a nail going through something. “What time did she leave?”

13:02 wed, Sep 30

Billionaire’s Betrayal. a contracted revenge

At that moment my wolf went very still.

Nooked at her. Really looked.

Her hands on the baby were shaking. She hadn’t asked where she could sit and Charlotte always asks before she sits anywhere. And her eyes were checking every door.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“She was with me today.” The words came out quickly, one into the next. “We went somewhere together, we split up when we left, she went south, I went north, and I have been calling her phone for an hour and it’s dead and she isn’t here and I don’t know where she is.”

“What do you mean she went south?”

“We split up at the service gate, she said she would go south and I should take the car north, and that was the last I saw of her.” Charlotte pressed the baby harder against her chest, and for once in her life the gesture wasn’t performance. “I waited. I thought she had just taken longer. I kept calling. Rieck, I have been sitting in that car for an hour.”

“What were you guys doing?” My voice came out very quiet. “What were you guys doing that made you split up at a service gate?”

She swallowed.

“Charlotte.”

“We got the baby back.” She looked down at the boy in her arms. “From Dawson’s apartment. Aurelia helped me. She got past the guard and walked him out herself and we went separate ways at the gate șo that if anyone was watching they couldn’t follow us both at once.”

“She walked into Dawson’s building?”

“It was my idea. I know. I know it was.”

“She walked into Dawson’s building while he is under federal investigation, while Kaelen is underground, while I have seventeen unidentified threats in my east files from the last two weeks, and she didn’t tell one single person in this house where she was going.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

1

“Get the hell out of my way.”

The calls took forty minutes and gave nothing back.

Four of my men on the south route, two of Tobias’s at the service gate, and the police on a wire that I had been paying long enough that they picked up before the second ring.

An hour, and the report was the same from every direction.

No woman matching her description. No disturbance on the south block. No cameras on the two streets between the gate and the main road, because the council had been replacing them since March and hadn’t

13:02 Wed, Sep 30 F.

»

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

finished.

ne-minute window. No footage.

I stood at the kitchen counter with the phone face-down and breathed through it.

Charlotte was still in my living room when I came back in. She was sitting on the white leather with the baby on her knees, and she looked up the moment she heard me.

“Anything?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.” Her voice cracked. “I’m so sorry. She said it would be simple. She said in and out.”

“If anything has happened to her.” I kept my voice very level, the way I keep it when I don’t trust what is under it. “You will hope, very sincerely, that I find whoever is responsible before I have time to remember that this morning you were in’ a cell waiting to hear from a dead man’s lawyer.”

Charlotte went white.

“Do you understand what I just said to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then go home. Keep the doors locked and don’t go back out tonight.”

She went.

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