Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 44

Chapter 44

Chapter 44

Rieck’s POV

I opened the file and the first page was a woman.

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She was young in the photograph, dark-haired, with a face that I knew before I had read a single line under it, because I had been looking at a softer version of it across my own breakfast table for weeks. The same shape to the jaw. The same set of the eyes. The same mouth.

“Her mother,” Tobias said.

“Where is she?”

“Dead, boss. The record is thin, but what there is points to the birth. She didn’t survive having the child. There is no marker, no plot, no service on file. Whoever buried her did it quietly, and a long time ago.”

I looked at the woman’s face a moment longer. Then I turned the page.

The next page was a man.

He was older than the woman, broad through the shoulders, with light hair cropped short and a hard, plain face. He wasn’t smiling. The photograph had the flat grey of an official record, the kind of picture a man didn’t pose for.

“Her father,” Tobias mumbled. “Derek.”

“Tell me.”

“He was a police officer, boss. Not an ordinary one. He worked the cases nobody else could close. Organised crime. Trafficking. The kind of men who don’t get caught because everyone above them is paid not to catch them. Derek caught them anyway. He put away three names in this city that everyone said couldn’t be touched. He had a reputation and he had enemies. A lot of enemies.”

I set the page flat on the desk.

“And then?”

“And then he vanished. No body. No notice. No resignation. One week he was working a case, and the next week the case was gone and so was he.” He paused. “A few days before he disappeared, he left a child at an orphanage on the east side of the city. A girl. Five years old. He told the woman at the desk that he would come back for her when it was safe.”

The room was very quiet.

“He was on a trail,” he went on. “From what I can piece together, he was close to something large, and he knew it was going to get dangerous, and he didn’t want the child anywhere near him when it did. So he put her somewhere he thought no one would look. And then he went after the thing he was hunting, and he didn’t come back

“Good work,” I nodded.

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Chapter 44

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“Thank you, boss.”

I turned the man’s photograph towards the lamp. A cop. A real one. The kind of man who walked into rooms other men walked out of. I had married an orphanage girl, a weak, underestimated thing who twisted her wedding band when she was nervous, and her father had been a man who put untouchable men in the ground.

I found it almost impossible to hold the two pictures in the same hand.

“No body was ever found?” I asked.

“No, boss.”

“Then I wouldn’t assume he is dead.”

Tobias nodded.

“A man who hunts the worst in a city doesn’t always die when he disappears,” I said. “Sometimes he goes deep so he can keep hunting. Sometimes he is taken and kept. Either way, keep looking. I want everything. Where he was last seen, the case he was working, who else worked it, who he answered to, and who wanted him gone. I want it on this desk, and I want it for no one else’s eyes but mine.”

“Yes, boss.”

“And the mother.”

“Boss?”

“Find the marker. There is always a marker. Someone laid her down somewhere. Find it.”

“Yes, boss.”

And with that, he left.

The office door opened without a knock, and the scent reached me before the sight did.

I quickly closed the file and slid it into the bottom drawer of the desk and turned the small key in the lock, and by the time Aurelia had crossed half the office, the file was gone and my hands were flat on the desk.

“You are out of bed,” I said.

“I’m out of bed.”

“Marta let you leave the floor?”

“Marta doesn’t get a vote on whether I do my job. Neither, I am afraid, do you.” She came to the front of the desk. She was pale, but her chin was up and her eyes were clear. “I’m the project lead on the eastern site. Mine. You gave it to me. The deadline you set is Friday and it doesn’t move just because I spent a week in a hospital. So I am here. To work.”

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Chapter 44

I looked at her.

A week ago I would have ordered her home.

But I didn’t say that.

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She was the daughter of a man who had hunted monsters. And maybe she had always been. Maybe the weak thing I had married had a harder thing folded up inside it, the way her father’s plain grey face had a record behind it that didn’t match the face at all.

“Fine,” I said. “Your office is down the hallway. Tobias will sit outside your door. You don’t leave this building without me. Are we clear?”

“We are clear.”

“Then go and work.”

Elara came for me twenty minutes later.

“Sir. The conference room. They need you now.”

I didn’t ask what it was. The set of her face told me it wasn’t small.

The conference room was full when I walked in. Twelve of them around the long table, and every face turned to the wall screen at the head of the room, where a muted news channel had been left running. Elara picked up the remote and brought the sound up.

A reporter stood in front of a building I knew. A building I had been planning to bid on.

Then the picture showed a man in a white dinner jacket, sitting in a soft chair under bright studio lights, a cigarette held loose between two fingers, his graphite eyes calm, bored and pleased with themselves all at

once.

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