Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 186

Chp 186; Blood And Gone.

Aurelia’s POV

The rope had been cutting into my wrists for so long I had stopped feeling my fingers.

So I counted the guards instead and there were five.

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The fifth was half-hidden behind the door, and that told me whoever had put me here wasn’t stupid about

“I want to speak to whoever is in charge.” My voice had gone rough. “Now.”

Nothing.

“I am pregnant.” I let that sit. “I need water.”

The nearest guard just looked at the wall above my head and didn’t blink.

I stopped talking and thought instead.

Stone room. Low ceiling. No windows. The kind of place that used to be something else and had been converted into exactly this.

A place to hold someone while you waited for a phone call.

‘What are you waiting for, Dawson?’

Somehow I already knew. He wanted Rieck on the phone. He wanted the paperwork. He had taken nre because I was the fastest lever he could reach, and he was pulling it from a distance, which meant he hadn’t yet decided what to do with me once the lever had served its purpose.

That was the part that frightened me.

Once he has the company back, I become a loose end.

I twisted my wrists against the rope and felt it bite deeper and made myself stop.

Then the door opened.

I expected a guard change. A tray, maybe. A phone.

I didn’t expect the white jacket.

“Hello, Aurelia.” Dawson walked in like he owned the room, which he did. His jacket was immaculate. His eyes moved over me with the calm of a man inspecting something that had briefly been misplaced. “You look terrible.”

“You look like a man who spent nineteen hours in federal custody and immediately committed two more crimes.”

“Fair point.” He crouched in front of my chair, eye level, unhurried. “I heard about your little rescue mission this morning. Very creative. I especially liked the Bureau letterhead you printed on a kitchen

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

machine.”

Charlotte safe?”

“She will be. In about ten minutes.”

My stomach twisted.

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” he said, standing, “that your loyalty is touching and entirely predictable, and I planned for it.

Suddenly the door opened again.

Charlotte came in first, the baby against her chest, two men behind her. She looked at me and her face came apart.

“Ri. I’m sorry. They were in the car when I…”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Is he hurt?”

“No. He’s fine.”

“Then stop apologizing and think.” I held her eyes. “You are both fine. That’s the only thing that matters right now.”

Dawson looked at us with the mild interest of a man at a play he has already read.

“Touching,” he said.

“What do you want, Dawson?”

“What was always mine.” He took out his phone. “And I believe I’m about to get it.”

The call came twelve minutes later.

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He answered it and listened, and the look on his face was the one I had learned to dread in two years of marriage.

The satisfied one. The one that said he had calculated correctly and wanted you to know he knew it.

“Good,” he said once. “I’ll send the location.”

He put the phone away.

“Your husband is a very practical man.”

“The paperwork means nothing if I’m dead.”

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

“Who said anything about you being dead?”

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You grabbed a pregnant woman off a public street. We both know how your negotiations end.”

He looked at me for a moment, and something moved behind his eyes.

I was about to argue when the first shot came through the ceiling.

Not through. Into.

The sound swallowed the whole room, and the guard nearest the door went down, and then the second one, and then everything happened at the same time.

Charlotte screamed. The baby woke up and screamed with her.

Dawson spun towards the door and the men behind Charlotte reached for their weapons and two more shots came in quickly, the kind that don’t need space between them.

Three were down. The fourth grabbed my chair from behind, using me as a shield.

I drove my heel back into his knee with every single thing I had left and he buckled.

As the chair went sideways, I went with it, and then a dead guard came down across my legs and I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and the blood was immediate and hot and soaking into my coat and my hair and the rope was still biting my wrists.

Just then I felt hands finding my shoulders in the dark, pulling two hundred pounds of dead weight off my legs, and sandalwood reached me before anything else.

“I’ve got you.”

Rieck’s voice, low and steady. Like there wasn’t a gunfight four feet from his head.

“The ropes,” I muttered, and in one second the pressure at my wrists were gone and my hands came forward and the pain that followed was extraordinary but I didn’t make a sound.

“Charlotte.” I grabbed his arm before he could pull me up. “Charlotte and the baby. I won’t leave without them. I won’t move one step.”

He looked at me angrily. Those pale eyes, faintly glowing in the low light.

“Tobias.”

He said it once, quietly, and Charlotte was beside me in under a minute with the baby still screaming against her chest.

Dawson was gone. A smear of blood at shoulder height on the doorframe where he had been standing, and then nothing.

‘He ran. Good. Run.’

The cold outside hit me like a wall.

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Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

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I stood on the street with someone’s coat around me, blood drying in my hair, Charlotte’s arm in my hand because my legs weren’t reliable and I wasn’t going to show it.

The baby had stopped crying. He was looking up at the dark sky with total calm, and under any other circumstances I might have laughed.

“Can you walk?” Rieck, beside me.

“I’m walking.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“I’m walking, Rieck.”

He put his hand flat on my back and left it there.

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