Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 187

Chp 187: His Father’s Son.

Aurelia’s POV

The hospital ceiling was very white and very still, and I stared at it for a long time while a doctor I had never met examined my body.

“The baby is fine.” He said it calmly. “Strong heartbeat. No signs of distress. Whatever you went through tonight, he came through it without a scratch.”

I slowly nodded and then pressed my hand flat over my stomach under the thin sheet.

“She needs rest,” the doctor told Rieck, who was standing at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed and his shoulder still dark with dried blood that wasn’t entirely his. “Real rest. Two days at minimum. No stress, no exertion, no…”

“Understood,” Rieck said, in the voice that means the conversation is over.

After the doctor left, the room went quiet except for the monitor, that small steady sound.

I looked at Rieck. He was looking at the monitor, not at me, jaw set, eyes flat, all that cold held in very tightly by a man who had driven across this city in the middle of the night and taken a room apart with his bare hands to get me out of it.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“Don’t.”

“Rieck.”

“I said don’t.” He finally looked at me, and what was in his face wasn’t the cold I expected. It was something rawer than that, something he hadn’t quite managed to put away in time. “Just don’t talk right now. Let the doctor’s machine do its job and don’t talk.”

So I didn’t.

Charlotte was in the corridor when they wheeled me out for the second set of checks, sitting on a plastic chair with the baby asleep across her knees and her head tipped back against the wall.

She opened her eyes the moment she heard the wheels.

“Ri.” She was on her feet before I could tell her not to bother. “How is he? Are you both all right? The nurse wouldn’t tell me anything for the last hour and I have been sitting out here going completely…”

“We’re fine.” I caught her hand. “Both of us. He’s fine, Charlotte.”

She sat back down very suddenly. “I shouldn’t have let you come with me today,” she said. “I should have found another way. I should have…”

“You would have gone alone, and then you would be in that room instead of me, and nobody would have come for you.” I kept her hand. “It’s done. He’s here. You’re both here. That’s all.”

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23 Wed, Sep 30

Billionaire’s Betrayal a contracted revenge

She looked down at the boy sleeping on her knees, and I saw her face do the same thing it had done in that stone room, that thing I couldn’t explain and wasn’t meant to witness.

“Does he have a name?” I asked.

“Cole.” She said it quietly. “I’m going to call him Cole.”

I didn’t say anything about the last name she had given him, or whose it was, or what it meant for the nan currently bleeding somewhere in this city with a Bureau warrant on his name.

Some conversations belong to a different night.

They discharged me at seven in the morning with a list of instructions Rieck read twice on the way to the

car.

The house smelled of Marta’s ‘bread when we came through the door, and I hadn’t known until that exact moment how much I had needed the smell of something ordinary.

“Child.” Marta appeared from the kitchen with flour on her hands and both eyes red. “Child, I have been awake since midnight.”

“I’m fine. Marta.”

“You have blood in your hair.”

“I know. I’m going to shower and then I’m going to eat whatever you’ve been making and then I’m going to sleep.”

She pulled me in by the shoulders and held on for a moment, tight and wordless, and I let her.

Then she let me go and went back to the kitchen and didn’t let me see her face, and I pretended not to see

it either.

I was halfway up the stairs when the front door opened again.

The cigar smell reached me before the voice did. Old wood and leather, sweet in the way that very old things sometimes are, like a book you don’t want to open.

“My dear girl.”

Hebvron stood in the doorway with Arnell behind him and his silver-tipped cane making its single quiet tap on the marble floor. His scarred face was arranged into something that was almost… worry.

“I heard what happened.” He came in without being invited, the way he always came in, the way a man moves through rooms he has always considered his own. “I’m glad you are safe. Both of you.” His eyes moved to my stomach with the calculation I had learned to read in the first month of this marriage. “Whatever Dawson’s failings, this was beyond even what I expected of him.”

“Was it?” I said.

“Aurelia.” Rieck, behind me, one quiet word of warning.

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Billionaires Betrayal a contracted revenge

“Thank you for coming, Hebvron.” I made my voice smooth. “I need to rest.”

smiled It reached exactly as far as his mouth.

“Of course. Of course you do.” He turned the cane once in his hand. “We will talk more when you are recovered. There’s much to discuss. The company, the legal proceedings, the question of what happens to Dawson now that he has made himself so visible to so many people.” He looked at Rieck. “Family matters.”

“I’ll see you out,” Rieck said flatly.

Rieck came upstairs an hour later.

I was clean and dry and sitting on the edge of the bed in Marta’s dressing gown, and I had spent the whole shower thinking, which I had been told expressly not to do.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, closing the door.

“I know how Dawson found me.”

He stopped.

“He knew where I was going,” I said. “He knew I would leave from the south gate. He knew the timing, the route, the gap between the guards.” I looked up at him. “I told nobody. Charlotte told nobody. The only person who knew I was planning something was you, and you let me think you didn’t, and you didn’t tell anyone.”

“Aurelia…”

“Which means somebody else was looking. Somebody who knew this house well enough to know I was planning something without being told. Somebody with enough reach to get that information to Dawson before nine in the morning.”

I watched his face.

“Your father,” I said.

The room went very quiet.

“No.” Rieck said it the way he says things he has decided. Hard and final, no give underneath. “That’s not what happened.”

“Rieck…”

“My father wouldn’t do that.”

“Your father drafted a clause to have me legally disposed of the moment I served my purpose. Your grandfather killed mine. And you are standing there telling me Hebvron Valerius wouldn’t hand my location to a man who just spent nineteen hours in a federal cell.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“How is it not the same thing?” I stood up. “He smiled at me today, Rieck. He came into this house and he

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