Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Rieck’s POV

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The blue dot on my screen haven’t moved in nine minutes, and the dot was in a street I didn’t let my men drive through after dark.

The dot sat in a side street between two industrial blocks four miles south of the penthouse, in a part of the city where the lamps were old and the cameras were older, and I have been staring at it for nine minutes with my phone pressed to my thigh and my back teeth set.

I should have called Tobias back two hours ago. I had been in the elevator with my hand on Marta’s shoulder telling her to lock the penthouse and not open the door for anyone, and my phone had rung in my pocket and the screen had said Tobias but I didn’t pick it. I thought it was the eastern site. I thought it could wait until I had my wife in front of me.

But it wasn’t about the eastern site. It had been the only thing in the world that mattered.

When I finally called him back, his voice was flat in the way it got flat when he had bad news to deliver, and he had said one sentence. He said “she got off the highway, boss, and she is on the long way home.”

“Two streets,” Ronan suddenly said.

“Faster.”

“Boss.”

“Faster, Ronan.”

The car took the next corner hard enough that the bag on the back seat slid against the door.

I tried calling her again, but the line didn’t ring. The line did not even pretend.

I have not prayed in twenty-three years. But at that moment I closed my eyes for half a second behind the screen and did something close to it.

A sound came through the windscreen before I even opened my eyes.

A crack. Short and hard. The kind of sound that did not belong on a city street and that every man who had spent time in a territory line knew before he had to think about it.

Ronan flinched in the front seat, but I did not. I sat up and my hand immediately went to the door handle.

“That was a shot,” Ronan said.

“I know what it was.”

“Boss.”

“Keep driving.”

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Chapter 33

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He drove. The car came up over a low bridge and down into a row of shuttered shopfronts, and at the end of the row, under the only working streetlamp on the block, there was a black town car pulled up against the kerb with its driver standing outside it and his hands in his hair.

I was out of the car before Ronan had stopped it.

I knew the car. I knew the licence plate. I knew the driver. The man saw me and his mouth opened and no sound came out of it, and his hand pointed at the mouth of an alley, and I was already past him.

The alley was the kind of dark that the city kept in pockets.

Two figures on the ground. One sitting up, knees pulled in tight, hands at her mouth, shoulders shaking. The other lying on her side with her hair fallen forward and one arm bent under her in a way an arm should not bend, and the pavement under her was wet in a way that pavement was not wet from rain.

The smell hit me before the shape did.

Vanilla. Rain on cedar.

And blood.

The world did the thing it had not done to me since I was nineteen. It went very small and very loud, and then it went very wide and very quiet, and somewhere in the middle of those two states the wolf in my chest stood all the way up for the first time in a long time and showed its teeth to nothing.

“Aurelia.”

I was on my knees on the wet pavement before I had named the action. My hand was under her shoulder and my other hand was at her throat looking for the pulse.

“Aurelia.”

She didn’t open her eyes.

The girl was talking but I couldn’t hear her. The girl was small and dark-haired and her coat was torn at the shoulder and she was saying words at me that I couldn’t pick up, and I had to physically turn my head to her and force my ears to find the shape of her voice.

“Please,” she was saying. “Please, please, she stepped in front of me, please.”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where was she hit?”

She raised her hand and her hand was shaking and she pointed at Aurelia’s left side, high, just under the collarbone, and the front of Aurelia’s pale silk blouse was the colour of a thing I didn’t let myself name.

I slid my arm under her knees and the other arm under her shoulders and I lifted her off the pavement, and the wetness on the ground had soaked through the side of her dress and through the side of my sleeve and

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Chapter 33

into my skin, and her head lolled once against the inside of my elbow.

“You,” I said to the girl. “Walk.”

She got up. She was unsteady on her feet. She didn’t argue.

“You,” I said to Aurelia’s driver, who was still standing by the kerb with his hands in his hair. “Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t call anyone. My men will be here in eight minutes. You will tell them every face you saw.

The hospital took her through the doors on a trolley with three people running beside it and a fourth on a phone, and I followed them as far as a corridor with a red line painted on the floor, and a woman in green scrubs put her hand on my chest and told me I couldn’t cross the line, and I stood there with the front of my shirt sticking to my skin and watched the swing doors close behind my wife.

The girl was beside me. Somebody had given her a blanket. She held the blanket closed at her throat the way a child held a towel after a bath.

“Sit,” I said.

She sat.

I didn’t sit. I stood at the line on the floor with my hands by my sides and my head full of the weight of my wife on my forearm, and I made the wolf in my chest sit down again, and again, and again, because if I let it stand I would put my hand through the wall.

A nurse came out of the swing doors. She didn’t look at me. She walked past me and down the corridor and into another door, and somebody said the word “theatre” on the other side of the door.

Ronan appeared at my elbow. I didn’t hear him come in. He held out a clean shirt and a clean jacket and a basin of water and a folded white cloth, and I looked at him once and he looked at me once and he set the things down on the chair next to the girl and stepped back.

I didn’t change my shirt.

I turned to the girl.

“What happened?”

She lifted her face. Her eyes were red and her cheek had a mark on it that was going to be a bruise by morning, and she opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again.

“It was an accident,” she whispered.

I waited.

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