Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 40

Chapter 40

Chapter 40

Rieck’s POV

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After ending the call, Aurelia was now sitting up against the pillows, the shawl slipping off her good shoulder as she stared at me.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I have to go.”

“Rieck.”

“I have to go, Aurelia.”

I walked over to the dresser, put my jacket on, and tapped my watch twice. The line on the other end picked up before the second tap.

“To the bedroom door,” I ordered. “Now.”

Within thirty seconds, a tall man in a dark suit, one of Tobias’s men, came down the hallway. He stopped at the threshold and waited.

Turning back to Aurelia, I said, “You stay here.”

“I’m not a child.”

“You stay in this building, Aurelia. Not the lobby. Not the gardens. Not the gym. The floor. Marta sees you, this man sees you, Ronan sees you. No one else. Are we clear?”

“Rieck,I…”

“Are we clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“You are putting me under guard in my own home.”

“I am keeping you alive.”

“It is restriction.”

“It is for the best.”

She looked at me, her mouth opening and closing. Something behind her eyes folded inward, the way it always folded inward when she was choosing not to fight the part of me she had started to understand.

I went to her and gently caught her chin between my thumb and finger, raised her face, and held it.

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Chapter 40

“Aurelia.”

“What.”

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“Don’t test me on this one.”

“Fine.”

Letting go of her chin, I walked back to the door. The man moved out of my way, and I left without looking back.

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The basement was quieter than it had been the night before, and quiet was the wrong sound for a basement that had three men in it.

Tobias was already at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The smell came up the stairs before the sight did, iron and stone and something colder under both, and I felt the wolf in my chest stand the rest of the way up before my second foot had hit the bottom step.

Two of the cells stood open.

The third cell was empty.

Two bodies on the floor between the open cells. My men. Pale. Throats opened in two clean lines. The drain in the centre of the floor had finally been used.

“Speak,” I said.

“It happened between three and four this morning, boss. Shift change. Whoever it was came in through the rear loading. Cut the camera feed for nine minutes. Knew exactly where we were standing. Both my men were down before they could draw.”

“And the cell?”

“Forced from the outside. The wide one is gone.”

“And the other two?”

Tobias didn’t answer. He turned his face towards the back of the room.

I crossed to the first cell.

The man inside was on his back, eyes open, mouth open, the way a man went when his throat had been closed by a hand and held closed past the point of return. There were no marks on him besides the bruising at the throat. No knife. No struggle. He had been killed by a person who hadn’t needed to draw a blade for

him.

I went to the second cell.

The crier from the night before. Curled on his side. Same throat. Same bruises. Same absence of any other

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Chapter 40

mark.

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I stood between the two cells with the cold of the basement coming up through the soles of my shoes, and I let the wolf in my chest read what the basement was telling me.

Three of them in a closed alley. One survives. Two of them in two cells. Both dead. The survivor was the wide

one.

The man who had looked me in the eye last night and refused to break. That one was the message.

I crouched beside the body in the first cell.

The sleeve of his shirt was bunched at the wrist. I took the cuff between two fingers and pushed it back. The skin of the inside of his forearm was clean for two inches, and then it was not.

There was a tattoo. Black ink. A skull, cleanly drawn, with an axe laid across the lower jaw at a diagonal. The blade pointed down.

I had seen the tattoo three times in my life. Once on a bouncer at a club two territories west, eight years ago. Once on a body my father had brought back from the northern border when I was twenty-three. Once on a courier my men had caught crossing into our east line last winter.

All three times, the tattoo had belonged to a man who answered to one name.

Kaelen.

I lowered the cuff back down over the wrist and crossed to the second body. Pushed back his sleeve. Same place. Same ink. Same diagonal blade.

I stood up.

“Boss,” Tobias called out.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Bury them,” I said. “Both. Deep. Tonight. No paper. No notice. The two of mine are family. Their wives will be cared for in the way the family cares. The other two go where no man will find them.”

“Yes, boss.”

“And the wide one?”

“Sir.”

“I want him alive.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Tobias.”

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Chapter 40

“Sir.”

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“You will close every door on the east line, every line on the south, and every face on a payroll that has come through this house in the last six months. I want a list by tonight. I want names on the list.”

“Yes, boss.”

With that, I went back up the stairs.

The office at the top of the Valerius Tower felt thinner than it had felt last night.

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