Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 39

Chapter 39

Chapter 39

Aurelia’s POV

I heard the elevator before I heard him.

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I was sitting on the edge of the bed with the shawl pulled across my shoulders and a fresh ice pack pressed to the knuckles of my right hand, Charlotte’s perfume was still in my hair somewhere, faint, refusing to leave.

The bruise on the inside of my wrist had turned purple in the last hour. My palm hurt where Charlotte’s pinned-up hair caught my fingers when I pulled. My shoulder under the bandage felt like it had been kicked by a horse.

He came through the bedroom door without knocking and stopped two steps in.

He looked at me a long time. The pale of his eyes went down to my hand, to my wrist, to the place under my shawl where the bandage sat, to my mouth, and back to my hand.

“Aurelia.”

He didn’t speak again for a moment. He just kept looking at me.

“You’re staring,” I whispered.

“I am.”

“Rieck.”

He came forward then. Slowly. He took the ice pack out of my hand, looked at the knuckles underneath, and set the ice pack back down on the cover beside me.

“From the look of her face,” he said, “you won.”

I almost dropped the shawl.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You’re not angry?”

“I’m tired. I’m not angry.”

“Rieck.”

“She was in our garden, Aurelia. She put her body in your way. She rubbed her belly at you. You hit her. That is not the part of tonight that I am unhappy about.”

“Then what part?”

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Chapter 39

“Wait here,” he mumbled.

He came back with a small flat tin in one hand and a clean cloth in the other.

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He didn’t ask me to raise my arm. He just took my wrist between two fingers, gently, and turned it towards the lamplight. Opening the tin, a sharp, green, herbal scent filled the air, the kind of thing a man kept in a drawer of his house because his line of work asked him to.

He then dipped the cloth.

“This will sting,” he warned.

He didn’t speak while he worked. His thumb moved against the soft of my wrist in small circles. He worked the medicine into my knuckles next, one at a time, lifting each finger, setting it back down, taking the next. He did the small graze along the side of my jaw with the corner of the cloth, his other hand cupping the back of my neck to hold me still, the calluses of his fingers warm on the skin under my hair.

I watched his face, but he didn’t watch mine. He was watching the medicine. His mouth had gone into the line his mouth went into when he was thinking, and whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t thinking about my

bruises.

“Rieck,” I said quietly. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

He didn’t answer. Instead he took my hand, turned it over, and pressed his thumb gently into the centre of the palm. His head was bowed. He wasn’t looking at me.

“Your parents,” he spat.

The word landed wrong. I looked at his bent head.

“My parents?”

“Tell me about them.”

“Why?”

“I just want to know.”

I took a shallow breath, feeling a pull on the bandage.

“There isn’t much to tell,” I mumbled. “I don’t remember much. I was small when I went to the home. Most of what I remember is the home itself. The yard. The bunk room. The woman who ran the kitchen. The day Dawson came to look at me, I was seventeen.”

“Nothing before?”

“Pieces. Almost nothing.”

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Chapter 39

“What pieces?”

“Rieck.”

“Aurelia, what pieces?”

I closed my fingers around his thumb without meaning to.

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“My father. I… I remember my father. A little. I remember the day he dropped me off. He had a coat on. A heavy coat. He smelled of… I don’t know, something cold. He told me to wait in the office of the home and that he would be back. He kept looking at the door behind him. The whole time he was talking to the woman at the desk, he kept looking at the door. As if… someone was coming.”

Rieck’s thumb stilled in my palm.

“He was in a hurry,” I continued. “He kissed the top of my head. He told me to be a good girl. He said, ‘I will come back for you, Aurelia, the moment it is safe. That is what he said. The moment it is safe. Then he went out the door. He didn’t come back.”

The silence that followed wasn’t a small silence.

“How old?” he said finally.

“Five. I think five.”

“And his face. Do you remember his face?”

“Bits. He had a… kind of light hair. Not blonde. Just light. And his eyes were, I think they were…”

I stopped.

“They were what?” he asked.

“Yellow,” I said. “Sort of. Like an autumn colour. It’s hard to remember. Maybe I’m imagining it. Children often do.”

He didn’t speak.

“Rieck. Why are you asking?”

He set my hand back down on my lap and closed the tin. Then he stood up.

“Just curious,” he said.

“That is not an answer.”

“That is the answer I have.”

He kissed the side of my hair without quite touching the skin. He took the cloth, the tin and the ice pack and walked out of the bedroom, and the door pulled shut behind him with a softness that didn’t match his face.

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I lay back against the pillow after he had gone and stared at the ceiling for a long time.

He wasn’t just curious. Rieck was never just anything.

He had been with the doctor at the hospital. I saw him come back into my room with his face changed. I thought, at the time, that whatever the doctor told him in the corridor was about my shoulder. That the bullet injury was worse than he wanted me to know.

But now I wasn’t sure.

I closed my eyes and let the day my father left come back to me the way it came back to me sometimes when I let it. The coat. The smell of him. The way his hand m felt on the top of my head. The way he looked at the door.

The woman at the desk did not know him by anything other than the name he gave her, and the name he had given her did not turn up in any record the home ever pulled.

I stopped looking by the time I was twelve.

I told myself, by the time I was fourteen, that he was dead.

Then Dawson came. And I had been the kind of girl who didn’t look back at a closed door when a man was holding open a new one.

In the morning he was already dressed when I woke up. Dark suit. The cuff that had the stain on it had been changed. He was buttoning his watch onto his wrist at the foot of the bed.

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