Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 38

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

Reick’s POV

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The convoy pulled over on the wet gravel of a service road four miles south of the river, I stepped out of the back of the SUV into the cold air, the building in front of me didn’t look like a building. It looked like a warehouse a man bought when he wanted no one to know he had bought a building.

Tobias was quietly waiting at the door. He gave a single nod and pulled the steel door open and stepped aside, I went down the metal stairs ahead of him into the basement.

The room at the bottom was concrete. A single bulb in a wire cage above the centre of the floor. A drain in the middle of the floor that had not been used yet tonight. Three cells along the back wall. Three men inside the three cells.

They were not as I had pictured them.

I had pictured them taller. I had pictured them harder. The man in the first cell sat with his knees drawn up to his chest and his cheek against the wall, he was crying. The man in the second cell was on his feet, but he was pressed into the corner of his cell with his hands flat against the wall, and his shoulders were shaking. The third was the wide one, the one the girl had pointed to, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back very straight, he was the only one who looked at me when I came down the stairs.

I slowly crossed the floor to the cells. I had all the time in the world.

Tobias stood at the foot of the stairs. Two of my men stood at the door and one of them was holding a cloth bag. The bag didn’t need to be opened. The shape of it told you what was in it.

The moment I stopped in front of the third cell, the wide one looked up at me, his mouth opening and then closing. He had been told, in the hours between the alley and this basement, who I was. I could see the knowing of it sitting behind his eyes the way a stone sat at the bottom of a glass.

“You shot my wife,” I said.

He didn’t speak.

“You walked into a closed alley with a gun in your hand and you fired it in a closed space with three women in it, and one of those women was my wife. Do you know who my wife is?”

He said nothing.

“Look at me when I am speaking to you.”

He looked.

“You messed with the wrong woman,” I said. “All three of you. You messed with the wrong woman, in the wrong city, in the wrong year, and the man you are looking at right now is going to spend the rest of this night, a portion of tomorrow, teaching your bodies exactly how wrong you were.”

The man in the first cell started to sob. The man in the second cell slid down the wall.

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10:11 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 38

I turned to Tobias.

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“Make it long,” I ordered. “Make it loud. I want every man in your unit to be able to hear it from the floor above. When you are done, I want their families to receive a small private message that says nothing and means everything. I don’t want bodies. I want their teeth, in a box, on my desk by Friday. Do you understand?”

“Yes, boss.”

“Good.”

With that, I turned and went back up the stairs.

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The office at the top of the Valerius Tower was the only place in the city that ever felt warm to me, but it didn’t feel warm tonight.

I stood at the floor-to-ceiling glass with my back to the desk, and I held a glass of whisky in my hand that I had not drunk from.

The doctor’s voice in the corridor of the hospital was still in head. “In my entire career, I haven’t seen this. I have read of it. But I haven’t seen it.”

Aurelia was orphanage-raised. The kind of woman who twisted her wedding band when she was nervous. She didn’t hear the doors of the boutique close behind Kaelen the day he had stood beside her. She hadn’t known what he was. She doesn’t even know what Alpha meant the night I had brought her to my penthouse. She had asked me, in the kitchen, in the third week of our marriage, why my eyes did the thing they did in the dark, and she asked it the way a child asked why a light bulb flickered.

“There’s no way. She’s human,” I whispered to myself.

But the wolf in my chest didn’t agree with me.

It stood up the moment I picked her up off the wet pavement in the alley, and it hadn’t calmed down, and tonight, here, at the window of my own office, it sat with its head turned slightly to the side, the way a wolf turned its head to listen to a sound under a sound. It was listening to the memory of her scent. Vanilla. Rain on cedar. And the thinnest cold note under both of those, that I had thought, until last night, was the cold of the alley.

Pine and snow.

At that moment, I set the glass down on the windowsill harder than I meant to.

“No.”

She was weak. She was small. She cried when I told her to take the dress off in the elevator. She had cried at the dinner when Charlotte called her hired help. She had bent over a kitchen sink and thrown up at a negative pregnancy test. She wasn’t a werewolf. She was a girl. She was my girl.

Without thinking, I picked up my keys.

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10:11 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 38

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The hallway outside my penthouse was lit in the soft amber of the late hour, and as the elevator buzzed, the doors slid open, and I saw them before they saw me.

Dawson was standing at my door in a white dinner jacket, with a cigarette burning between two fingers. He stood with his weight on one hip, his other hand resting low on Charlotte’s back, Charlotte was beside him with her white coat pulled tight across her belly and the side of her face the colour of an old rose. Her lip was split. There was a small graze on the line of her cheekbone. Her hair, which was always set, wasn’t set.

As soon as the elevator doors closed behind me, the pressure in the hallway went down half a degree.

“Rieck,” he started. “We need to talk.”

“You need to leave.”

“Cousin.”

“You are not my cousin tonight.”

“Look at her. Your wife did this. Your wife laid hands on a pregnant woman in a garden. In your garden. In your house. And you are going to stand at your own door and tell me to leave.”

I looked at Charlotte. The split on her lip was small. The graze on her cheekbone was small. The bruise on her face was the bruise a woman got when she got her face slapped by another woman.

“Keep your wife in check, Rieck,” Dawson said. “I am asking nicely.”

“I don’t take instruction at my own door.”

“Cousin.”

“Charlotte is the one you check. Not Aurelia. You came to my doorstep, with the woman who started a fight with my wife. I am going to give you to the count of five to step into that elevator and leave. If you are still standing in this hallway at the count of five, you and I will be having a different kind of conversation, and you will not enjoy it.”

“What?”

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