Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 41

16:11 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 41

Chapter 41

Aurelia’s POV

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By noon I had walked the length of the penthouse forty times, and the guard at the door watched me do all forty.

Rieck still wasn’t back, and he hadn’t called. The morning had turned into afternoon, afternoon was thinning toward evening, and the silence of the rooms had started to do a thing to me I didn’t like.

I missed him.

I sat on the white sofa with that for a while, turning it over in my mind.

I hadn’t missed Dawson, not a little bit, not in two years, not even at the start when I had still believed the start meant something. I had filled Dawson’s absences with other things and been glad of the room.

Rieck’s absence didn’t leave room. It left a shape, and the shape was the size of a man, and the apartment didn’t feel like mine without him in the doorway.

I pressed my thumb against the band on my finger and made myself stop thinking about it.

The guard stood by the elevator, hands clasped in front of him. He hadn’t spoken since morning. He watched me the way a man watched a kettle he had been told not to let boil over.

I stood up and went to the window. The city was down there, glittering, moving and free, and I was up here, healing, watched, and kept.

But I was tired of being kept.

So I got dressed.

It took me longer than it should have. My shoulder wouldn’t move the way it should, but I managed. I got into a soft dress and a long coat that hid the bandage, and I brushed my hair until it covered the graze on my jaw, then I put my phone in my pocket and a card in my coat and I walked to the elevator.

The guard moved in front of the doors.

“Ma’am. I can’t let you leave.”

“I am going to a shop.”

“Mr. Valerius said the floor.”

“Mr. Valerius is not here.”

“Ma’am.”

He didn’t move. He put his body across the doors, square, steady, a wall in a dark suit, and I understood in that moment exactly how little a wall like that thought of a woman in a coat.

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16 11 Mon, Aug 4

Clipder S

but gave him something by din denn

Move I said gunerly Or wall ut my stand that you tell you frather the

His face chang

Man 1 newNT”

I know you didnt Pour that is no the pen the prose withers say happened Yet he hand on the wife while he was hit You held me by the arm Your Saft Ark. I wittert my cho “Who do you feel he hasni

The word of a guard, or the word of his witer

The man werd very still

He knew the answer We both knew the showry is far way what we did to men on toured weed ww bis, and he had no way to prek a thing he hadst done, and I watched the thy Area betworks as eyme Come out where I needed to come o

“I will be just an hour. I whisperert, Maybe less I will come back thorough fesat den moves you will will have your job and none of this will have happened You have my mos

After a few seconds, he slowly stepped aside

pressed the button. The doors opened 1 got in before he could change has marked

Thank you I said as they closest

He didnt ariswer

The street took me the way a river took a leaf

I had meant to go to the grocer two blocks down. I told myself that was the plan, a shop, a small ordinary errand, the kind of thing a normal woman did on a normal afternoon

But the moment I got to the corner where the grocer was and looked at its doors, I kept walking

I didn’t want groceries

I wanted this.

The air on my face. The noise of the aty. A flower seller on the corner with buckets of colour out front. A man selling roasted nuts from a cart, the smell of them sweet and warm in the cold. A woman pushing a stroller. Two students laughing over a phone. People Ordinary, unwatched, unkept people, going wherever they wanted to go without a man in a dark suit counting their steps.

I had spent five years in an orphanage being told where to stand. I had spent two years in a marriage being

told where to stand I had spent the last weeks being told where to stand in a different way, a softer way, a way with sandalwood in it that I had started, God help me, to want

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16:11 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 41

For one block, no one was telling me where to stand.

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