Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 185

Chp 185: The Dead Man.

Rock’s POV

“You have twenty-four hours.”

Dawson’s voice slowly came through the phone like smoke through a keyhole. Like he was enjoying every syllable.

“The paperwork is simple enough even for a construction man. Sign the company back. All of it. Every property, every frozen account, every piece of paper that woman walked into that government building with.” There was a pause, and the faint sound of a cigarette. “Or I send her back to you in pieces. Starting with the ones she’ll miss least.”

I didn’t say a word.

“Twenty-four hours, Valerius. I suggest you don’t spend any of them threatening me.”

And with that the line went dead.

Setting the phone down on the table, I stood there for a moment in the quiet of my own apartment with the city glowing through the glass and the space beside me where she should have been standing.

‘Twenty-four hours.

I picked my coat up off the chair and left.

The Bureau of Corporate Affairs opened at eight.

I was on the steps at seven forty, and the woman who unlocked the door looked at my face and didn’t tell me to come back later.

“I need the reversal paperwork,” I told the front desk. “The Valerius Group seizure. All of it. I need the forms to hand the assets back.”

The clerk blinked. “Sir, the seizure was authorized three days ago. To reverse it you would need to….”

“I know what I need. Just get me the forms.”

She got me the forms.

I sat at a long table in a side room with a pen in my hand and the whole of Aurelia’s work spread in front of me, four hundred pages of her father’s theft, her neat tabs, and her handwriting in the margins.

Without thinking too much about the whole thing, I picked up the pen.

Suddenly the door at the far end of the room opened and a man came in and sat two seats away with his own papers, and I didn’t look up, because I had twenty-three hours and forty minutes and no patience left for anything that wasn’t the line in front of me.

But then something pulled at the back of my neck.

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UZ wea, Sep su

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

น

I don’t know what it was. Something old and cold and without a name. The same thing that tells me when

border has been crossed before Tobias calls to report it.

I looked up and the man was reading his papers.

Late forties, maybe fifty. Lean. A jaw that had been broken at some point and healed slightly wrong. Quiet hands, the hands of a man who has spent a long time keeping them still on purpose.

And a face I had seen before.

Not in this city. Not in any room I had ever walked into.

In a picture. On a drive Aurelia had stolen from Dawson’s vault, a buried file with a police record attached, and a picture of two young men standing together.

One of them had been Lord Valerius.

The other one was sitting two’seats away from me in a government office, reading a form about property registration, and he wasn’t dead.

It was Derek.

At that moment I felt sick but I put my eyes back on my own page and kept them there, and the pen in my hand didn’t move for a full minute.

He was alive.

Aurelia’s father, killed on a Lord’s order, sealed in a file, mourned by a daughter who had built her whole war on the evidence of his murder was alive. In this building. Today.

“Excuse me.” His voice was low. “Do you have a spare pen? Mine has run out.”

I looked at him.

He met my eyes and held them with the steadiness of a man who is deciding something very fast.

“Take it,” I said, and slid it across.

He took it without a word and went back to his papers, and I went back to mine, and neither of us said another thing.

I was on the front steps with the forms folded in my coat when he appeared beside me.

“You’re Rieck Valerius,” he said.

“I’m in a hurry.”

“I know.” He fell into step with me, unhurried, hands in his pockets. “Rooffe Construction. Married Aurelia seven months ago. Contract marriage, which I imagine you understand I find interesting.”

I stopped walking.

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13:02 Wed, Sep 30 F.

Billionaires Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“Who are you?”

Someone who is very good at finding people who don’t want to be found, and very bad at letting things alone when I know something is wrong.” He stopped one step ahead and turned around. “Your wife is missing. I know where she is. And I know what you are about to do with those papers.”

“Step aside.”

“I won’t let you do what you’re about to do.”

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