Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 37

Chapter 37

Chapter 37

Aurelia’s POV

“Yes, Father.”

:.

The two words sat in the room after Rieck had said them.

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I, on other hand, laid very still against the pillow and watched my husband and I saw the moment it landed for him.

His shoulders eased by half a millimetre. His jaw, which had been locked since the word staircase had come out of his father’s mouth, let go.

Gunshot would have brought his father’s hand back to the cane. Gunshot would have brought a Northern Faction war council to my bedroom by morning. But staircase was a small mistake. Staircase was a careless husband and wife and a thing a man fixed inside his own house.

So he went with it.

Suddenly Hebvron turned towards the door, but then he stopped.

“Son,” he said. “Walk me out.”

“Yes, Father.”

He turned to the bed.

“Daughter, please rest well.”

“Yes, Father, I will.”

“You will be round by the time I come back, will be well fed. And you will be upright.”

“Yes, Father.”

He smiled at me, then laid his free hand against my cheek, he held it there for one second, or maybe two, then his thumb moved against the bone of my jaw, and I knew, the way an animal knew, that he was reading me one last time before he left.

Finally he turned away.

Rieck crossed the room behind him without looking at me and the bedroom door pulled half shut behind them.

He didn’t come back to the bedroom for fourteen minutes. And when he did, his eyes had cooled, and his hair was set again, and he carried a small glass of water in one hand. He set the glass on my bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed.

“What did you say to him?” I asked softly. I made it sound like a question a wife asked because a wife asks her

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Chapter 37

husband questions.

He didn’t look at me.

“Business,” he replied.

“Business?”

“Nothing about you.”

“Rieck.”

“Nothing about you, Aurelia.”

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He picked up my hand, turned it over on the cover. Then he looked at the band on my finger for a long second, then he set the hand back down gently, and he stood up.

“I have to go,” he said. “Tobias is waiting.”

“Okay.”

“Marta will sit outside the door, incase you need anything.”

“Alright.”

He kissed the top of my head and left.

GOODDSUGOODS

I gave it forty minutes.

I lay against the pillow and took a deep breath, I listened to Marta in the kitchen, and I listened to the building come back to its night sounds. I felt a slight pull under my collarbone where the stitches were, and the lower pull of the lie I had told, and the lowest pull of the lie my husband had brought back into the bedroom on top of mine.

Business. The word sat in his mouth wrong. He said it the way a man said a word he had taken off a shelf because the right word was on a higher shelf, and he hadn’t wanted to climb to it.

Needing air, I slid my legs off the bed slowly, got into the soft house shoes by the bed. I tied my robe loosely over the gown and I picked a long grey shawl from the dresser, wrapped it over my good shoulder and brought the corner across my chest to cover the bandage at my collarbone. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the dresser. I didn’t look like a woman who had been shot. I looked like a woman taking a walk.

“Ma’am,” Marta looked up from the kitchen when I stepped into the hallway.

“I need air.”

“Ma’am, the doctor said…”

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Chapter 37

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“I am going to the gardens. The lower terrace. Twenty minutes. Tell Ronan if he asks. I will keep my phone in my pocket.”

She looked at me for one second longer. “Twenty minutes,” she said.

“Twenty.”

The elevator took me down to the second-floor terrace gardens. Rieck’s building had its own. White gravel paths between low boxwood hedges. Stone benches. A long reflecting pool with a fountain that ran at low pressure at night. The air outside the elevator was cool.

Beyond the railing, the city burned in long lines of gold.I breathed deeply for the first time in three days.

Then I smelled the lilies.

Sickly. Sweet. The wrong note in the cool air. I knew the perfume before I turned my head, and before I named the woman. My body knew both, and my hand inside the shawl went to my band on its own and twisted once.

“Ri.”

She was sitting on the second bench from the fountain. White coat. Pale hair pinned up. One hand resting low on the curve of her belly.

“Charlotte.”

“Sweetie, you don’t look well.”

“What do you want?”

“Want?”

“What do you want, Charlotte?”

She got up from the bench slowly. She took her time crossing the gravel toward me, and her shoes made the small sound a woman’s shoes made on gravel when she wanted to be heard, she stopped four feet from me with her chin up and her free hand still on the belly.

“Honey,” she said. “Is this how you greet an old friend?”

“You aren’t one.”

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