Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 32

Chapter 32

Chapter 32

Aurelia’s POV

:.

The traffic hasn’t moved in eleven minutes, and the dashboard clock said four seventeen.

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I sat in the back of the black car with the project folder closed on my lap and the screen of my phone dark in my hand, because the battery had given up on me somewhere between the eastern site and the second roundabout. I had felt the cord in my bag. The cord was in my bag. But the car charger had been removed two days ago by Marta when she vacuumed, and neither of us thought to put it back.

Leaning my head against the cold window, I let the glass take the heat from my temple.

The site had been wrong. That was the only word I had for it. I walked the cleared ground with Vance’s man at my elbow and Tobias two steps behind me with his hand never far from his hip, and somewhere between the third stake and the fourth I felt the air shift and I turned.

I didn’t tell Tobias what I saw and he did not ask. He had only opened the back door for me and shut it and walked a slow circle around the perimeter of the lot with his eyes on the trees before he finally got in beside the driver and told the man to drive.

He got out at the city line and said he had to make a call. And he said someone would meet me at the penthouse.

“Ma’am,” the driver suddenly said, and I lifted my head. “We are not moving.”

“I can see we are not moving.”

“There is an alternative route.” He tapped his screen and the map redrew itself in a thin orange line that bent through three side streets I have never been on. “It is not the route I would normally pick for you. The road is poor in two places. And the area is not the kind of area we drive through after dark.”

I looked at the clock. It was four eighteen.

Rieck hasn’t called me back. I called him twice from the site this morning before the phone died. But he didn’t pick up either time. He had been with his father for hours and he hadn’t answered me, and the only thing in the world I wanted right now was to be standing in our hallway when he came through the door.

“Take it,” I said.

“Ma’am.”

“Take the alternative route. I am already late.”

He held my eye in the mirror for one second longer than a driver was supposed to. Then he tapped the screen, and the car eased out of the line of traffic.

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The buildings got lower. The signs got fewer. The orange streetlamps hadn’t yet come on, but the sky had started to pull the colour out of everything, and the storefronts we passed had grates pulled halfway down

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Chapter 32

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over their windows, and the few people on the pavement walked with their shoulders pulled in close to their bodies.

The driver said nothing. His hands were tight on the wheel as he took every turn slowly.

I should have been thinking about the site. I should have been thinking about the figure in the trees and the way my hand went to my collar before my mind named what my body already knew. I should have been thinking about Rieck.

But I was thinking about none of it.

Just then a loud cry came through the glass and I immediately sat up.

It sounded like a woman, sharp and then suddenly silenced, the way a sound got cut off when a hand went over a mouth.

Leaning forward in my seat, I saw that we were on a street with one streetlamp and four shuttered shops and a narrow alley running off to the left between two buildings, and at the mouth of the alley there were five figures and one of them was small and the four were large.

“Stop the car,” I said.

“Ma’am, no.”

“Stop the damn car.”

“Ma’am, please, this is exactly what I told you about, we can’t.”

“I said stop the car!”

The wheel turned sharply and the tyres rolled the last five feet and the car came to rest at the curb. The driver turned in his seat with his face white under the streetlamp.

“You will stay in this car,” I whispered. “Lock the doors. If anything goes wrong, drive.”

“Ma’am, you can’t.”

“You will stay in this car.”

I opened the door before he could say anything else.

The cold air hit me first. Then the smell. Old water, and something else, the rotten edge of a street that didn’t get cleaned.

I walked the twenty steps to the mouth of the alley with my heels striking the pavement loud enough that the four men heard me before they saw me, and three of them turned, and one of them did not, because his hand was still on the girl.

She was young. Younger than me. Her bag had been ripped half off her shoulder and her cheek had a red mark on it and her eyes were wide and wet and fixed on a point past me, and when I stepped into the alley her shoulders jerked once, the way an animal jerked when it remembered it was not alone.

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Chapter 32

“Let her go, I said.

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The four men looked at me. Three of them were tall. One of them was wide. They wore the kind of clothes you wore when you did not want to be remembered. Their faces sat in the bad orange of the lamp.

The wide one laughed.

“And who the hell are you?” he asked.

“The last person you want to mess with tonight.”

He laughed again. But it wasn’t a real laugh. It was the sound a man made when he has decided he was going to do a thing and he wanted the others to hear him decide it.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “Get back in your car.”

“Let her go.”

“Sweetheart.”

I looked past him to the girl. Her hand was on her bag and her bag was on the ground.

“Come here,” I said to her. “Behind me. Now.”

She moved and she was fast. She ducked under the arm of the man holding her and got two steps before he caught the back of her coat and pulled her short, and the girl made a sound that was half a sob and half a hiss, and I took one step into the alley.

“I will say it again,” I said. “Let her go.”

“Or what?”

“Or you will not like what comes next.”

The wide one looked at the others and the others looked at the wide one. The one holding the girl let her coat go for half a second to roll his shoulder, and she scrambled the rest of the way to me and put her back against the wall behind my shoulder, and I felt her shaking.

“Lady,” the wide one said, and his voice had gone flat. “You picked the wrong street.

“So did you.”

His hand went to the back of his waistband.

I saw the gun before he had fully drawn it. Black. Short. Held wrong, as if he wasn’t trained on how to use it.. I saw him hold it and I saw the other three step back the half step, and I saw the girl behind me raise both her hands to her mouth.

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