Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 42

Chapter 42

Chapter 42

Aurelia’s POV

The hit didn’t come.

VPN 564

55 vouchers

I stood in the road with my arm across my face and my eyes shut. The air in front of me pushed forward and then stopped, the heat of an engine reached my legs through my coat, and there was nothing else.

Lowering my arm, I saw that the first SUV had stopped less than a foot from me. The grille was close enough that I could see the heat coming off it. The tyres had left two short black lines on the road behind them.

For a moment, I forgot to breathe.

Then the window on the middle SUV rolled down.

Rieck looked at me from the back seat with his pale eyes and his jaw tight in the way it got when a man was deciding between two very different things. He looked at me for a long second, the way a man looked at a thing he had almost lost and was angry to have almost lost.

“Get in.” he said.

I got in without a word, and the convoy moved.

He didn’t speak for the first five minutes.

And neither did I. I sat with my hands folded in my lap and my coat still half-open, my breathing still short. The near-miss had made my whole body loud. I could feel my heartbeat in my shoulder and in my knuckles.

Rieck hadn’t looked at me again. He sat with one arm resting on the door panel and his face turned to the window on his side.

“I only went out for air,” I suddenly said.

“I told you to stay on the floor.”

“I needed to breathe. I wasn’t going far.”

“You were standing in the middle of a road.”

I pressed my lips together as there was no answer for that. He was right and we both knew it, anything I added would only cost me whatever ground I still had.

After a moment, Rieck’s phone came out.

He dialled. He didn’t put it to his ear. He held it flat, speaker up, between two fingers on his knee.

One ring Then two.

174

16:12 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 42

“Sir.” The guard’s voice was small.

“Tender your resignation,” Rieck said. “Tonight. Leave your badge with Elara in the morning.”

“Sir, I…”

“You had one instruction.”

“Sir, she said… she told me she would, sir, she…”

“You had one instruction,” Rieck said again. “One. Tender your resignation.”

He ended the call.

I turned to him.

“Rieck. He is not at fault. I told him that you had…”

‘Don’t speak unless spoken to.”

Without thinking. I closed my mouth and turned back to the window.

I stood in the elevator with my chin up and told him Rieck would believe me over him.

I was right, but now a man has lost his job because of it.

We drove for another ten minutes without a word between us.

VPN 564

55 vouchers

At some point I felt him look at me. Not long. Just for a few seconds. But I kept my face at the window.

“Your shoulder,” he finally whispered.

“It’s fine.”

“You are holding your arm.”

I hadn’t noticed I was. My right hand had moved across my body and was under my left elbow, taking the weight off the bandaged side.

“Rieck, it’s fine.”

He said nothing more and looked back at his window.

The car finally pulled over, but it was at a gate I hadn’t seen before.

Not the eastern site. This was past the industrial line, past the last junction before the city thinned out into flat ground and low scrub. A chain-link fence ran the length of the road on both sides, and beyond it, the land went on, grey and flat, and the sky pressed down on it with the heavy weight of a day that was over.

2/4

16:12 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 42

Rieck got out.

VPN 544

55 vouchers

And I got out too. Not because he told me to. He hadn’t told me to do anything. But the air outside the car was better than the silence inside it, and my legs needed the ground.

Tobias was standing at the gate.

Rieck walked to him. They went three steps past the gate onto the rough ground and turned their backs to the cars, and Tobias began to speak, low, his face forward and his eyes on the flat land beyond the fence.

I stayed by the SUV.

I shouldn’t have been able to hear them. The wind was going the wrong way and there were two cars between me and where they stood. Tobias’s voice was the kind of voice a man used when he didn’t want to be overheard. But the wind shifted, only for a moment, and a man’s voice carried differently out here where there were no buildings to eat it up.

“Deep in the city,” Tobias said. “Not at the border. Not the east line. Central. Near the old commercial district. Three of them.”

Rieck said something I didn’t catch.

“Confirmed.” Tobias nodded. “The tattoos matched. We ran the plates on two vehicles. Both came back clean, which means they came back false.”

I pressed my shoulder against the cold metal of the SUV door and watched the two of them standing against the grey of the land, and I let what I had heard sit inside me.

Kaelen’s men.

Not at the border. Not at the edge of his territory, where a man’s men were supposed to be. Deep in the city. Near the centre of everything that Rieck owned, ran and protected. Three of them, with false plates and clean

papers.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify