Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 43

Chapter 43

Chapter 43

Rieck’s POV

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She started to speak the moment the elevator doors opened.

“Rieck, about the guard, I want to…”

I walked past her into the bedroom and shut the door.

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I heard her stop in the hallway, then I heard her stay there. I stood with my back to the door, my hand still flat on the wood, and I let the anger stay where it was. If I let it out of the place it was sitting in, I would say something I couldn’t take back, and a man didn’t get back the things he said to a wife in anger.

She had left the building.

One instruction. The same one I had given the man who was now writing his resignation. And while I stood in a basement looking at two of my own men in the cold with their throats opened with Kaelen’s mark on the wrists of the men beside them, my wife had talked her way past a guard, walked out into the open city and put herself in the middle of a road with my own cars bearing down on her.

I didn’t go back out to her. I let the door stay shut. It was the only way I knew to keep the thing in my chest from turning into something she didn’t deserve.

In the morning, I would deal with the rest of it.

The guard came to the lobby to hand in his badge.

I was walking through my own building when I saw him at the desk, his uniform jacket folded over his arm, badge in his hand. His shoulders were straight. He wasn’t making a scene. He had come to lose his job quietly and walk out without a word, the way a man did when he believed the loss was deserved.

Aurelia stepped out of the elevator before I reached him.

She quickly crossed the lobby and put herself between the man and the desk, and she turned to face me.

“He is not going anywhere,” she said.

“Aurelia.”

“He is not, Rieck. If he walks out of this building today, I have no reason to stay in it either.”

“That is not a thing you decide.”

“It is exactly the thing I decide. You can put a man on me every hour of every day. You can lock the floor and take my phone and have Marta sit outside the door. But you don’t get to ruin a man for a thing I did to him. I lied to him. I told him you would believe me over him. I made him choose between his job and a story I invented, and he chose wrong because I made wrong the only choice he had.” She didn’t look away from me.

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16:12 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 43

“If you are going to fire someone for what happened on that street, fire me.”

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The lobby wasn’t empty. Two of my staff had stopped near the far wall. The man at the desk had his eyes on the floor and his jaw tight, and I could see that he hadn’t asked her to do this, and that he was as surprised by it as I was.

I looked at my wife.

She hadn’t slept well. It was under her eyes. And she was standing between a fired stranger and the Alpha who had fired him, with her chin up, spending her own footing on a man whose name she didn’t know.

She was selfless and stupid.

I didn’t have many people in my life who would risk anything for a man they owed nothing to.

“He stays,” I said.

The man’s head came up.

“He stays. But he isn’t paid for the month he is owed. A mistake costs something. That is what it costs. The next one costs more.” I looked at the man directly for the first time. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” the man said. His voice was rough. “Thank you, sir.”

I already turned away with that.

Aurelia caught me at the elevator.

“He can work with that,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”

She came to me that night.

I was in the study with a glass I hadn’t touched, going over the patrol map Tobias had sent. Every entry point from the southern bridge to the east gate. I felt her in the doorway before I heard her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I didn’t look up.

“I mean it. I shouldn’t have left. I was bored and restless and I felt like a thing being kept on a shelf, I made a foolish choice, and I almost paid for it with my life and nearly cost a stranger his job in the same hour.”

“You could have died.”

“I know.”

“My convoy, Aurelia. My cars. A foot of road. Do you understand what I am telling you? When I tell you to stay, it is not to keep you on a shelf. There are men in this city tonight who want you in the ground. The only thing between you and them is the wall I have built around you. And today you walked out through the wall

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Chapter 43

and went looking for the open air on the wrong side of it.”

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Without another word, she came into the room and crossed to the back of my chair. Then she laid her hand against the side of my face, and turned my face up to hers.

“You are too tense,” she whispered. “You haven’t slept. You haven’t eaten since yesterday. You are tired.”

“Aurelia.”

“Let me.”

She leaned down and put her mouth on mine.

I should have pushed her hand away. There was a map in front of me and a war coming. But the wolf in my chest, that had been restless since the basement, didn’t care about any of it. The second her mouth touched mine it stopped being restless and turned everything it had towards her, and the map stopped mattering.

I caught her wrist. Not to move it, but to hold it where it was.

“You broke my rule today,” I said against her mouth.

“I know.”

“You don’t get to disobey me and then distract me.”

“Then stop me.”

But I didn’t stop her.

I pulled her down into my lap instead, mindful of her shoulder, my hand spread flat against the small of her back. She leaned into me, her good arm sliding up around my neck, her fingers pushing into my hair.

I kissed the line of her jaw where the graze had nearly healed. I kissed under her ear. I kissed her throat, and she made the sound she made only for me, and her hand pressed flat over my heart where my wolf had finally gone still under her palm.

She kept touching my face the whole time. She always did now. She had learned it was the one thing that undid me, and she used it without mercy. Her palm on my cheek, her thumb at the corner of my mouth, holding me like I was worth holding onto.

At the office the next day I couldn’t hold a single thought before it bent back toward her.

Three contracts sat unread in front of me. But I kept thinking about how she had felt asleep against my side. I thought about her putting her body between me and a fired man in my own lobby. I thought about her hand on my face, the sound she made and the cold thread under her scent, and I hated all of it, because none of it was in the agreement, all of it had started to matter more than the contract did.

I was getting attached.

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