Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Reick’s POV

I had been sitting in the chair for six hours, and I hadn’t stood up.

VPN 91

55 vouchers

The hospital had given my wife a private room on the seventh floor and a glass partition so I could see her through from the hallway, and after I refused to leave the hallway they had put me in the chair by her bed instead.

She was small under the blanket. They had washed the blood out of her hair and the side of her face, and the bandage on her shoulder went up to her collarbone and disappeared under the gown.

The doctor came in every half hour to check the line in her wrist and the bag hanging beside the bed and the little black machine that clipped to her finger and showed her pulse in green numbers. He didn’t speak to me. He had learned not to in the first hour. He moved around the bed the way a man moved around a dog he wasn’t sure of, and he made his small notes and left.

The girl was asleep in a chair down the hallway. Ronan had taken his jacket off and put it over her shoulders an hour ago without being told. He stood at the door to the room now with his back to me and his hands clasped low in front of him.

I have been a lot of things in my life. I have been cold. I have been angry. I have been the man at the head of a table that men older than my father walked carefully around.

But I have not, until tonight, been the man who waited.

Just then Aurelia’s lashes flickered.

I sat up and leaned forward in the chair and put one hand on the edge of the bed and watched her face the way a man watched a candle in the wind.

Her eyes slowly opened and the white of them was clear. She found the ceiling first, the way people did, and then she found the lamp, and then she turned her face on the pillow and she found me.

Her hand on the cover moved towards mine and then stopped, and her eyes welled up with tears.

I gently took her cold hand in mine and put my other hand over the top of them so they were between both of my palms, and I held them, and I didn’t say anything for a long second.

“Hi,” she finally whispered.

“Hi.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No.”

“Rieck. I…”

1/4

10:10 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 34

:.

VPN 91

55 vouchers

“No,” I interrupted. “Not now.”

Suddenly the door opened, and the doctor walked in quickly and quietly with his clipboard against his chest and his eyes on the green numbers and not on me.

He checked her pulse at the wrist. He checked the bandage. He shone a thin light into one eye and the other. He took her blood pressure and waited and took it again. Then he turned to me and his face was the face of a man who stopped a thing he had not expected to stop.

“Mr. Valerius,” he started.

“Yes.”

“She is awake. That is good. That is very good. But she is not strong yet. The surgery was long. She has lost a lot of blood. I am going to ask you something and I am going to ask you for her sake.”

“Go on. Ask.”

“Don’t question her tonight.”

I held his eyes.

“There will be time,” he continued. “Tomorrow. The day after. There will be all the time. Tonight she has a body that has decided not to die, and the kindest thing we can do for that body is let it rest. The questions can

wait.”

I looked at her, and she was staring at me. Her eyes were wet and her lips were dry and her hand inside mine had started to warm.

“Fine,” I nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

He paused at the door.

“Sir,” he whispered. “When you have a moment. There is something I need to discuss with you. Outside.”

“Right now?”

“When you are ready, sir.”

I looked at Aurelia and her eyes were already closing again. The little black machine showed her pulse climbing slowly back towards a number the doctor had stopped frowning at. She didn’t need me at this exact second. She needed sleep and she needed the bag on the stand to finish, and she didn’t need to hear what a doctor wanted to say to her husband in a corridor.

The corridor smelled like every hospital corridor in the world. The lights were too white. The floor was too shiny. The doctor walked me twenty steps from her door, around a corner, into a small alcove with a tall narrow window and a single chair in it, and he stopped there.

2.4

10:10 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 34

He set the clipboard on the chair and turned to me.

“Mr. Valerius,” he said. “It is a miracle she is alive.”

“I know.”

“Sir, you don’t. Not yet.”

“What do you mean?”

VPN 91

55 vouchers

“The bullet came in here.” He touched a place on his own chest, just under the left collarbone, an inch in from the line of the shoulder. “It went through clean. We retrieved it from the back of the muscle on the other side. The angle was straight. The path was straight. The path of that bullet, Mr. Valerius, should have gone directly through the upper chamber of her heart.”

At that moment, the corridor was very quiet.

“By every textbook on the floor of this hospital,” he continued. “She shouldn’t have made it to the door. The shot was inside the kill cone. It should have been over before your driver opened the back of the car.”

“Speak plainly.”

“It didn’t go through her heart.”

“How do you mean?”

He paused to take a deep breath, a breath he had been holding for the past six hours.

“Because her heart is not where her heart should be.”

“What?”

“It is a condition. It exists, but it is extremely rare. The heart sits slightly off from its normal position in the chest. A few millimetres can save a life. In her case it is more than a few millimetres. Her heart is shifted. Far enough that the bullet passed by it.”

“How far?”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify