Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 35

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

Aurelia’s POV

The first thing I knew was the weight on my hand.

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It was a heavy weight. A warm one. A familiar one. I knew the calluses of it before I had remembered my own name, and I lay very still under the hospital blanket with my eyes closed and let the weight be the only thing in the world for a long moment.

When I opened my eyes, he was leaning forward in the bad vinyl chair with his elbows on his knees and his other hand pressed flat against his mouth. His shirt was the wrong shirt. It had a brown stain on the cuff that didn’t belong on a fresh shirt. His hair was messy and there was a shadow under his jaw, and his eyes when they were on my face were the colour of the sky outside the window, pale and tired and very awake.

“Hey,” I whispered.

“Hey,” he said.

His hand on mine tightened slightly, and then let go and then he took my hand again, the way a man took a hand when he had not been sure for a few hours whether he would get to.

“You came,” I mumbled.

“I did.”

“How long?”

“Not long enough.”

I smiled, but it hurt. The bandage under my collarbone pulled and I felt the shape of it for the first time. But I smiled anyway, because his face had done a thing in the last second that I had only ever seen it do in our bedroom at four in the morning.

Then I watched his jaw set and his shoulders square and his mouth lose the soft place it had had a second ago, and I knew before he spoke what kind of question was coming.

“Aurelia.”

“I know.”

“Tell me you know.”

“I do.”

“Tell me you know what reckless means.”

I bit the inside of my lip.

“Rieck.”

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Chapter 35

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“You got out of a car in a closed alley with four men in it. You walked towards a gun. You sent the girl behind you and you walked towards the gun. Don’t tell me you didn’t see it.”

“I… I saw it.”

“Then tell me why.”

“I am sorry,” I said. “I am so sorry. I don’t know why I… I don’t, I just, she was on the ground and they had her bag and…”

“Sir.”

The voice came from the doorway. Small. Steady. The girl was standing there in a hospital cardigan two sizes too big for her and her hair pulled back off her face, and her cheek had finished going to bruise the colour of an old plum. She stepped one foot into the room with both her hands flat against the front of the cardigan.

“Sir, please,” she said. “Please. It was my fault. I should have been off that street an hour earlier. I had no business there. She, your wife, she saw me and she stopped. She didn’t, sir, she didn’t pick this. I picked it. I was the one in it.”

Rieck looked at her.

“Sir, please don’t be angry with her.”

He didn’t say anything. He looked at me. Then he looked at her again. Then his phone buzzed on the arm of the chair, and his eyes dropped to the screen, and I watched something tighten in his shoulders that had nothing to do with me.

He picked it up.

“Yes.”

The voice on the other end said something short.

“On my way,” he said, and ended the call.

As he stood up, his hand left mine and I felt the chill of it on my fingers and on the inside of my wrist and somewhere lower.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To fix it.”

“Where, Rieck?”

“To fix it, Aurelia.”

He bent and picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. He shrugged it on and buttoned the front cuff that had the stain on it without looking at the stain, and he turned to go.

But then my hand moved before I had told it to and I caught his arm.

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I didn’t catch the sleeve. I caught the inside of his forearm, below the cuff, on the skin, and I held it.

“Stay,” I whispered.

He looked down at my hand.

“Stay. I want you to stay. Please.”

He looked at me for a long beat before he sat back down.

He didn’t put his hand back on mine right away. He took his phone out and he typed something with one thumb, and the typing was short and ugly the way his typing got ugly when he wanted a thing done and didn’t want to repeat the wanting.

I watched his thumb move and I watched his jaw and I knew what he was sending, and I knew, in the same moment, that I did not mind it.

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The doctor came on his evening rounds with his clipboard against his chest and an easier face than the face he had worn the night before. He shone his thin light in my eyes. He pressed two fingers to my wrist. He read the bag on the stand. Then he stepped back.

“Two more days, Mrs. Valerius,” he said. “Then we will send you home. The shoulder will be sore for a while. The rest of you is, frankly, healing better than I have a right to expect.”

Then he left.

The girl had stayed against the wall through the whole visit, and now she pulled the cardigan tighter at her throat and went to step out of the room with him.

“You,” I suddenly called out.

She stopped.

“Why are you still here?”

She looked at her shoes. Hospital slippers. Paper. Too big.

“I didn’t know where to go,” she said.

“You have no one?”

“I have an aunt in the south district. But I haven’t spoken to her in two years. The men knew where I worked, so I can’t go back there tonight.”

“You can stay.”

“Mrs. Valerius, I…”

“You can stay until you know where you are going.”

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Chapter 35

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She met my gaze and her eyes filled the way eyes filled when a person had been carrying something for a long time and had not been allowed to put it down.

“Ma’am,” she said. “You are the first person who has ever, who has, who has stood for me.”

“Come here,” I whispered.

She came slowly around the foot of the bed and leaned down and put her cheek against my good shoulder.

I raised my good arm and laid it on her back. She didn’t sob. She just breathed against me for the count of ten, and I just held her, and somewhere above the top of her head I felt Rieck’s eyes on us.

He cleared his throat after a minute and stood up.

“I will be in the corridor,” he said as he let himself out without looking at either of us.

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