Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Aurelia’s POV

He was here.

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I didn’t need to turn around. His smell had already filled the room. The pressure in the foyer shifted. The lilies of Charlotte’s perfume thinned out. Dawson’s hand froze in the air an inch from my face.

When I turned, Rieck was standing in the open doorway with one hand on the frame and his eyes pale enough to glow. He wasn’t breathing hard. He wasn’t raising his voice. He was just there, in a black coat, taking up the entire doorway in the way only he could.

His gaze moved from me to Dawson’s raised hand to the red on Charlotte’s cheek and back to me. He took it in inside two seconds. Then he stepped over the threshold and the air came with him.

“How did you…” I said.

“Your phone.”

He had been tracking me. And I didn’t know whether to be angry or to lean against the wall in relief.

He didn’t look at me again. He walked past me to Dawson and stopped close enough that Dawson had to tip his chin up to meet his eyes.

“I told you,” Rieck said quietly, “to stay clear of her.”

Dawson’s mouth tried to find the bored smile and could not. The glass in his hand trembled the smallest amount. He covered it with a sip and the scotch on his breath came up off him in waves.

“She came here, Rieck. To my house. Yelling. Slapping my pregnant fiancée. I haven’t laid a hand on her, you can ask the cameras.”

“You were about to.”

“She swung first.”

“And you were about to.”

Just then Charlotte made a small wounded sound from the wall. She was still cradling her cheek. She kept looking from Rieck to Dawson and back like a woman waiting to be remembered.

Rieck’s eyes finally came back to me.

“Aurelia.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The whole of the last twenty four hours had risen up into my throat all at once, and I couldn’t speak through it.

Two and a half years. The bottle. The slap. Dawson’s voice saying “the Valerius name is not a charity drive for

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Chapter 20

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orphanage girls.” It all sat behind my tongue like a stone.

The tears came before the words.

“Take me home,” I whispered. “Please. Just take me home.”

He looked at me for a long second before he turned to Dawson.

“If I see your shadow within a mile of my wife again, I will not warn you a third time.”

Then he took my elbow and we walked out.

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The car ride was a lake of cold.

He drove himself. Ronan was nowhere. The streetlights crossed his face in long stripes and his hands on the wheel were so still it looked like he was carved. He didn’t speak until we hit the third red light, and when he did his voice was the quiet one. The worst one.

“Why were you there, Aurelia?”

“Rieck.”

“Why were you in his apartment?”

“It is not what it looks like.”

“I am asking. You are answering. That is how this works.”

I pressed my forehead to the cold glass of the window and closed my eyes. Two and a half years of thinking I was the problem. Every birthday I had cried alone in the bathroom. Every Christmas his mother had asked me when I was finally going to give them a grandchild and I had smiled and said soon. “Soon.” While he sat across the table and ate his roast and watched me with those shattered grey eyes and knew.

He had not just broken me. He had taken every soft year I had to give and made sure none of it could ever

count.

“Aurelia.”

“I am not pregnant.”

The car drifted half an inch in its lane before he caught it.

“Say that again.”

“I am not pregnant. I have never been pregnant. I can’t get pregnant on the pills he had me on. Two and a half years of wellness vitamins, Rieck. They were laced. He paid the coach. He didn’t want a child from me. Ever. He told me to my face.”

The light turned green, but he didn’t move the car.

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Chapter 20

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A horn went off behind us and he still didn’t move. He sat with both hands on the wheel and his jaw working and I could see, in the side of his face, the wolf trying to come up through the man.

“I will kill him,” he said very calmly.

“No.”

“Aurelia.”

“No, Rieck. Not tonight. Not like this.” I turned in the seat to face him. “If you go back there now, you give him what he wants. A scandal. A police report. A story Hebvron has to clean up. He gets to be the victim of the violent new husband and the whole city decides I drove you to it. We don’t give him that.”

“Then what?”

“You let me have him.”

He looked at me, and for the first time in the whole horrible evening, his eyes flicked something that was not rage. But something closer to attention.

“You?”

“I am the one he tried to erase. Let me be the one who erases him. In my own time. In my own way. You can sharpen the knife. I will be the one to use it.”

The car behind us laid on the horn again before he drove.

He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He drove all the way home with his hand resting over mine on the console and his thumb running very slowly, along the back of my knuckles.

That was as close to yes as Rieck Valerius would ever come.

Hebvron was already in the living room when we walked in.

His silver-tipped cane was leaned against the white leather sofa. Three large boxes were stacked on the coffee table, all wrapped in blue tissue paper, all tied off with navy ribbon. The smell of cigars and old leather hit me before he even turned around. He looked at us over his shoulder and smiled the slow theatrical smile.

“There you are.” He spread his hands. “I let myself in. Marta has been very patient with me. I brought a few small things.”

He walked to the boxes and lifted the lid off the first one. Inside, in tissue, was a tiny navy blanket embroidered with a wolf head in silver thread.

“A boy,” he said, pleased. “I felt it in my bones. Four weeks tomorrow, yes? You will have had the scan. I am told the new machines can tell you very early now. So.” His eyes went to mine, then to Rieck’s. “Tell me. Am I right?”

I looked at Rieck and he looked at me.

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I didn’t know what was on my own face but I could feel it. A flicker. A second too long. And Hebvron caught it. His head tilted half an inch. The smile didn’t move, but something behind his eyes settled the way a chess player settles when he sees three moves ahead instead of two.

“Children,” he said, more softly. “Is something wrong?”

I stepped forward before Rieck could speak.

“Hebvron. There is something you should know.”

I felt Rieck go still beside me.

“The scan, it…”

“Was inconclusive.”

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