Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Aurelia’s POV

“Who is this?” I asked.

:

There was a small sound at the other end, almost like a suppressed laugh.

“Who is this?” I asked again, harder.

Then, the call suddenly ended.

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I sat at the dining table with the phone still pressed to my ear, and I listened to the dial tone the way a woman listens to a knock on a door at the wrong hour.

The pile of project files in front of me had gone strange. The map of the eastern industrial line. The blue dotted territorial border. The green pin.

Just then a door opened somewhere in the penthouse, and the scent of sandalwood reached me before his footsteps did.

I gathered the files together with hands that were not quite steady and folded the map back into the pile. By the time he came around the corner of the wall and into the open kitchen, the table looked like an ordinary stack of homework.

“You’re still up?”

“Yes, I am.”

He stopped at the end of the table. He had changed out of the work shirt. A black sweater. The cuffs pushed once. His eyes went from my face to the phone face down on the wood and back to my face.

“Aurelia.”

“Hm.”

“Who called?”

“No one.”

“Aurelia.”

“It was… a wrong number.”

He looked at me for a long second, but he didn’t touch the phone.

“The project,” he said, evenly. “How far have you got?”

“I have it.”

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“You have it?”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

“In the morning.”

“Aurelia.”

:

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I suddenly stood up and crossed the small floor between us. I stood on my toes and put one hand at the side of his jaw and kissed him.

I didn’t think about it. I didn’t plan it. My mouth was on his and his mouth was warm and very still under mine, and for one second I felt him breathe in through his nose the way a man breathes in when he is trying to taste something without admitting that he is tasting it.

Then he moved.

His hand came up to my elbow. Not unkind. Not rough. He set me back down on my heels and moved my hand off his jaw and put it at my side, the way he had set my hand back on the table in the conference room, and the message was the same in a different room.

“Not now, little wife.”

“Rieck.”

“I have somewhere to be.”

“It’s almost ten.”

“My father has asked for me.”

I looked at him and he looked back.

“Hebyron?”

“Yes.”

“At this hour?”

“Mmhn.”

“About what?”

He didn’t answer right away. He looked at the pile of files at my elbow, and then at the dark window, and then back at me.

“About what we owe him,” he said.

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His side of the bed had not been turned down in the morning

I knew it before I opened my eyes. The mattress on his side was flat under my outstretched hand, the pillow exactly as Marta had left it the day before, the corner of the duvet still tucked the way she tucked it He had not come home.

When I sat up, the room was very quiet. The sun was a pale grey wash on the floor-to-ceiling glass, the kind of light the city had when it was going to rain by afternoon.

I went out to the dining table bare feet. Marta was at the stove. She didn’t look surprised to see me at half past

six.

“Did he come in last night?”

“No, ma’am.”

“At all?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Marta.”

She set a cup of tea in front of me without asking. I picked up the phone and dialed his number, but the call didn’t even ring. It went to the voice that told me his line was unavailable.

I tried calling him again, but it went to voicemail.

Setting the phone down, I drank half the tea without tasting it.

I had a project to lead, so I went to the bedroom and put on the cream blouse and the navy skirt and the lower heels, the ones I could walk a site in. I tied my hair back and looked at the woman in the mirror. She didn’t look like she had slept. She looked like she had decided not to.

His office was empty.

I had taken the long way around because I hadn’t wanted to give Petra the satisfaction of a question. The door of the corner office stood open. The lamp on the desk was off. The chair was pushed in. The coffee cup that lived on the left edge of the desk by the keyboard was clean and dry.

He hadn’t come in this morning either.

I quietly closed the door to his office and made my way back to my own. As I walked, my phone buzzed in my hand, startling me.

It was Vance calling, not Rieck.

“Mrs. V, the car is waiting downstairs for the eastern site walk. ETA 09:15,”

I had just two minutes to gather the necessary files.

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The car was a black SUV. The driver was not Ronan. He introduced himself as one of Vance’s men and held the door without making eye contact. Tobias was already in the back seat. He nodded at me the way he nodded at Rieck. He didn’t ask after his boss and that was the only sign I had, on the whole ride out, that he knew where Rieck was, and that he had been told not to tell me.

The drive took fifty minutes.

As we headed east, the city slowly thinned out. The buildings got shorter, and the road got wider. At the second freight rail crossing, the SUV slowed for a long line of cars, then turned off the main road onto a service track that wound between two grey warehouses and emptied out onto a wide flat clearing of dirt and gravel.

The site was bigger than the map had made it look. Half a kilometre of flat ground, with a low chain-link fence at the far end, and beyond the fence, woodland. Real woodland. Tall trees, thick at the base, gone soft at the edges with the mist that the cool morning had not yet burned off.

I got out and Tobias got out on the other side and said something quietly to Vance’s man. The man nodded and walked towards the fence at the far end. Tobias stayed three paces behind my shoulder.

“Mrs. Valerius.”

“Tobias.”

“Stay on this side of the orange flags. There are old service trenches near the tree line and we have not all of them mapped.”

“Understood.”

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