Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Aurelia’s POV

I didn’t sleep.

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I lay on my side of the bed and just stared at the city lights flickering through the floor-to-ceiling glass and counted the slow even breaths I couldn’t seem to find. The duvet on Rieck’s side stayed flat. He didn’t come home.

Somewhere around four I heard the elevator buzz, and the front door open, and the sound of a man taking his shoes off in the hallway. But he didn’t come into the bedroom. He slept in his study.

The morning came up grey and quiet. I sat at the kitchen island and stared at the plate of toast Marta had set in front of me. I hadn’t touched it. I hadn’t touched the tea either. Even the lemon water had gone warm in the glass.

“Eat, ma’am. Please.”

“I am not hungry.”

“Eat anyway.”

I picked up a corner of toast. Set it down. Picked it up again. Marta watched me with her arms folded and the country quiet of her face doing the work that words couldn’t.

The elevator chimed at half past seven and Rieck walked through the kitchen on his way to the door without looking at me. Black coat. Hair still damp from the shower. The smell of him, sandalwood and that cold metallic thing under it, ghosted past my shoulder. He paused at the threshold for a half second, the way a man pauses when he has forgotten something.

He didn’t turn around.

And then he was gone.

I put the toast down.

“Ma’am.”

“Don’t.”

“Ma’am, you haven’t slept.”

“I said don’t.”

She didn’t say it again. She refilled the lemon water. She stood there for a long quiet minute. Then she reached into the pocket of her apron and put something on the marble in front of me with a small soft click.

The white bottle.

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17:01 Fri, Jul 31

Chapter 19

The olive branch on the label.

:

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The lid was still off the way I had left it on the bathroom counter last night when I tipped the rest of the pills into the toilet and watched them dissolve.

“I found this in the dustbin,” Marta whispered.

I closed my eyes.

“Marta.”

“Since when,” she said quietly, “did you start keeping secrets from me?”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

She sat down on the stool beside me. She didn’t touch me. She just sat, and waited, and after a long moment I reached for the bottle and turned it in my hand.

“They were not vitamins.”

“I gathered that.”

“Two and a half years, Marta. For two and a half years he had me on these. There was never anything wrong with me. I was never broken. He was making sure.”

She didn’t gasp. She didn’t put her hand to her mouth. She breathed out very slowly through her nose, and the line between her brows deepened, and she nodded like a woman confirming the answer to a question she had been asking herself for a long time.

“Ma’am.”

“Hm.”

“You need to be on the real ones now. The fertility pills. Today. Not tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“If they find out I have been helping you with this and you are not actually pregnant, I lose my job. I lose more than my job. You understand that.”

“I know, Marta.”

“Then know it properly.” Her voice was steady. “Take the pills. Every morning. With food. We have a window. We won’t waste it.”

I looked at the bottle in my hand and thought about Dawson sitting across from me at a thousand candlelit dinners, asking how I was feeling, telling me to be patient, telling me his mother had taken three years to conceive him. I thought about the wellness coach pressing a fresh bottle into my palm at the door with that warm professional smile.

Suddenly I stood up.

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Chapter 19

“Ma’am? Where are you going?”

“To handle some matters.”

“Aurelia.”

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It was the first time in months she had used my name without the title. I stopped at the edge of the kitchen and looked back at her.

“I will be back soon,” I said. “I promise.”

I went upstairs and put on the black dress with the high neck. I didn’t bother with much makeup. I didn’t need to look beautiful for this. I needed to look like a woman who had finally finished waiting.

00000000000

Charlotte opened the door.

She was in cream silk, barefoot, one hand resting on the small swell of her belly the way pregnant women do when they want you to look. Her hair was loose. Her lips were pink. Her perfume hit me the moment the door swung in. Lilies. Sweet and thick and almost rotten under the sweetness.

Her eyes traveled down me and back up.

“Ri.” She drew the sound out. “Sweetie. You look tired.”

I walked past her into the apartment.

“Excuse me.”

“I am not here for you.”

“Ri.” She caught my elbow and her nails dug a little. “Ri, honey, you can’t just walk in here. This is my home now. You should have called. We could have arranged a more dignified time for whatever this is.”

I turned to look at her hand on my arm. Then I looked at her face and I thought about how she had comforted me in the past.

Without thinking, I slapped her.

The sound was very loud in the marble hallway.

She stumbled back a step as her free hand flew to her cheek. Her mouth opened and stayed open. She looked at me like I had pulled a knife.

“You,” she said. Her voice had gone high and trembling. “You hit me. You hit a pregnant woman, Ri. You will regret that. You have no idea what you have just done.”

“Where is he?”

“Ri.”

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17:01 Fri, Jul 31

Chapter 19

“Where. Is he.”

“Charlotte?”

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Dawson’s voice came from the hallway behind her. Slow. Annoyed. The sound of a man in his own house being interrupted before coffee.

He came around the corner in a white shirt with the cuffs rolled, a glass of something amber already in his hand at half past eight in the morning. He saw me and the annoyance changed into something else. The graphite in his eyes went flat.

“Aurelia.”

I held up the bottle.

His eyes flicked to it. Stayed on it for half a second too long. Then they came back to my face and he tried, he genuinely tried, for the bored smile.

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“Two and a half years.”

“Aurelia.”

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