Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Aurelia’s POV

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I immediately felt my mouth go dry because I had no idea what they had been discussing for the past hour.

I had been sitting there counting the angle of Rieck’s wrist on the table and the number of red pins on the south side of the city map. I didn’t know the supplier’s name. I didn’t know what the contract value was. I didn’t know whether the penalty clause was a number or a percentage.

What I did know was that twelve men were waiting for me to speak.

Suddenly a soft knock interrupted the tense room.

The door opened slightly, and an HR assistant I had seen twice in the corridor stepped halfway in with a slim folder under her arm.

“My apologies, sir. For Mrs. Valerius. You asked this morning.”

She crossed the room in five quick steps, set the folder on the wood in front of me, and was back at the door before anyone had turned a head.

I looked at Rieck, but he didn’t look at me.

Then I opened the folder.

It was a one-page summary. The south district overrun, in clean black type, with the supplier’s name across the top and the contract value at the bottom in bold. The penalty clause was at the bottom right corner of the page, marked in red ink. Underneath the summary, a second page. A map. Three other Valerius construction contracts inside the same supply radius, the dates of their delivery windows lined up in a column.

I looked at the second page for one second, then looked at the third before closing the folder.

He had built this for me. The HR assistant hadn’t come on her own. The folder was not a file. The folder was a hand.

“The supplier is six days behind,” I started. “If you press the penalty clause now, you collect on a contract that has a smaller margin than the deal underneath it. But that is not the part that costs you. The part that costs you is page two.”

I turned the folder so the man with the grey hair could see it.

“You have three more contracts inside the same supply radius. Two of them go to delivery inside the next eleven weeks. If you press the penalty on this one, those three suppliers read the move tomorrow morning. They will quietly add eight to twelve percent to their next quote. That is what you save against the south district overrun and that is what you spend on the next three. The number is not close.”

The grey-haired man was looking at me now in a different way.

“And the supplier?”

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“You give him a private visit,” I continued. “Not a letter. A visit. You sit in his office on Friday morning and you put the penalty clause on his desk and a pen on top of it. You tell him that the pen is heavier than it looks. You give him until Monday at six. If the trucks have moved by Monday, the pen doesn’t move. If they have not, you sign on Tuesday and you put the word out on Wednesday so the other three suppliers hear the move from a friend and not from a magazine.”

“And the cost of the visit?”

“Cheaper than the eight percent. Much cheaper than the twelve.”

Rieck hadn’t moved. His hand was still flat on the table next to mine. His face hadn’t changed.

“Clarification,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why Friday?”

“Because his trucks are loaded on Saturday. If you arrive on Friday, you give him one working day to make a different decision and one weekend to live with it. Monday at six is the first moment a different decision is provable.”

“Why Monday at six and not Monday at nine?”

“Because at six his foreman starts the shift and at nine you are already on your second meeting of the day. Six tells him the deadline is yours.”

There was a small silence.

“And the language of the visit.”

“Soft. You don’t raise your voice. You don’t name the other three contracts. You don’t need to. He will know.”

At that moment, the room had gone so quiet I could hear the click of the air conditioning at the far wall.

If a needle had been in the room, it would have fallen onto the carpet and the carpet wouldn’t have been thick enough to swallow the sound.

Rieck looked at the map on the wall for a long beat. Then he looked at the grey-haired man.

“Impressive,” he said.

It was one word.

But he said it.

“Implement her position,” he added. “All of it. By Friday morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

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Chapter 29

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I didn’t remember the walk back to my office.

I sat down in the leather chair behind my empty desk and I put my hands flat on the wood and I sat there for two full minutes without moving. My palms were damp. The skin at the back of my neck was damp. I had been cold for the entire meeting and now the cold had broken into a thin sweat all down my spine.

I had spoken in a room of twelve men.

I had spoken about a deal I hadn’t been briefed on.

I had spoken in his voice. Quiet. Steady. Unhurried.

I didn’t know whether to be proud of myself or terrified of myself.

Just then the door of my office opened without a knock.

He didn’t sit.

He stood on the other side of the desk with one hand at his side and the other resting on the back of the chair across from me, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a piece of equipment that has performed above its specifications and is now going to be put on a heavier shelf.

“That wasn’t nothing.”

“Thank you.”

“You will lead the project.”

I stared at him in shock. “What?”

“The south district position is yours. You drafted it. You implement it. I will give you Tobias for the visit on Friday and Vance for the construction side. You take it from there.”

“Rieck.”

“Yes.”

“I am not… I have never led anything. I sat in a corner office for a week with a brass plate that didn’t have a job under it. I can’t lead a project.”

“You just led the room.”

“That was one folder.”

“That was twenty minutes.”

“Rieck.”

“My position stands, Aurelia. Your suggestions. Your project.”

I stood up. My knees were less steady than they had been in the conference room.

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Chapter 29

“Does that mean you are not angry anymore?”

His eyes narrowed slightly.

“Angry about what?”

“The Marston deal.”

The room went still.

He looked at me for one long second.

“How,” he said, very evenly, “do you know that name?”

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“Your laptop was open on the desk in the bedroom the night you stayed up. The screen had timed out by the time I got up at two. It came back on when I touched the trackpad to turn it off for you. The Marston thread was at the top.”

“You unlocked it?”

“It asked for the password.”

“Aurelia.”

“Your date of birth, Rieck. I have signed enough Valerius paperwork in the last two months to know it without trying.”

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