Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Aurelia’s POV

I had been told the conference room was on the thirty-second floor.

And I wasn’t on the thirty-second floor. I was somewhere above it.

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I had taken the elevator from my own office to clear my head after the third client folder of the morning, and I hadn’t pressed thirty. I had pressed forty and I hadn’t even noticed.

The corridor was different up here.

The carpet was thicker. The walls were a softer grey. There were no analysts at any of the open desks, because there were no open desks. Every door on this floor was closed, and the doors were heavier than the ones on my floor, and the brass plates beside them did not have names. They had numbers.

I walked slowly and I felt very much like a woman who had taken the wrong staircase in a museum and was about to be politely escorted out.

A door at the end of the corridor opened a little bit as I passed it, and I saw one second of the room behind it. A long table. Pale wood. Some men around it. One woman with her hair pinned at the nape. Two laptops open. A map on the wall the size of a window.

And at the head of the table sat Rieck.

His sleeves were rolled twice. His tie was straight. He had one hand flat on the wood and he was speaking very quietly, the way he spoke when the room had to lean in to hear him. The man closest to him was nodding without lifting his head. Tobias was at his right shoulder, standing, not sitting, with his arms folded.

The door had been opened by the woman with the pinned hair. She was leaning out to speak to someone in the corridor that I had not seen. Her eyes went to me for one beat, but she didn’t look surprised.

I took one step back.

“Aurelia.”

Rieck hadn’t raised his voice. He didn’t need to. The single word travelled out of the room and around the half-open door and reached me in the corridor as cleanly as if he had been standing behind me.

As soon as I stopped, every face at the table had turned to the door.

“Come in.”

“I… I was looking for the thirty-second floor.”

“Come in, Aurelia.”

The woman with the pinned hair pushed the door the rest of the way open. There was nothing to do, so I just walked in.

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10:09 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 28

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The conference room was colder than the corridor. Not cold from anger. Cold from the kind of climate control that men in rooms like this preferred when they were going to be in suits for four hours. The map on the wall was the city, and there were small red pins clustered along the south side, and a single green pin on a parcel I didn’t recognise near the eastern industrial line.

“This is my wife,” Rieck said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. He was still watching the man at the far end of the table. “Aurelia. Sit.”

He gestured to the chair on his left.

Tobias was on his right. The seat on his left had been empty.

I sat and folded my hands in my lap and tried to make myself the size of a smaller woman.

There was a moment of silence at the table. One of the older men, grey at the temples, expensive glasses, glanced at Rieck and then at me and then back at Rieck, the way a man glances when he has just been told the rules of a meeting have changed and he is deciding whether to object.

But he didn’t object.

“Continue,” Rieck said.

The man with the pale folder cleared his throat and continued.

I didn’t hear the first ten minutes of it.

I sat in the leather chair with my hands in my lap, and the words steel index and prefab licence and phase two grading moved across the room and went straight through me. I was busy with smaller things. The angle of Rieck’s wrist where his hand rested on the table next to mine. The fact that he had not pulled the cuff of his sleeve back over the line of the tattoo at his collarbone, and that the very top of the ink was showing where the collar of his shirt sat open by one button. The fact that the woman with the pinned hair had quietly placed a glass of water in front of me without being asked.

The fact that no one in the room was looking at me, meant that everyone in the room was very carefully not looking at me.

I picked up the glass and drank a small sip, then I set it back down without sound.

“And the south district overrun,” the man with the glasses was saying. “We are at six days now. If we are in ten days by Friday I am going to recommend the penalty clause.”

Rieck didn’t answer.

But then he turned his head, slightly, towards me.

“Aurelia.”

I felt every face at the table swing without moving.

2/4

10:09 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 28

“Yes.

“What would you do?”

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