Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 46

Chapter 46

Chapter 46

Aurelia’s POV

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I didn’t sleep on the white sofa, and I didn’t sleep in the bed.

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I lay on top of the cover in the dark with the wall of Rieck’s back turned to me, listening to him breathe, and I went over what he said until the words stopped hurting and started sounding true.

“Your job is not a project lead. Your job is an heir.”

He was right and that was the part that sat worst. I signed a contract with one line in it that mattered, and somewhere in the last weeks I had let myself forget the line. I had taken a corner office, a brass nameplate, a seat on his left in his conference room, and I had started to believe I was a woman building something, when I was just a woman who had agreed to build one thing, and had not yet built it.

In the grey light before morning I got up and stood in front of the mirror over the dresser.

Untying my robe, I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and looked at myself.

Flat. Smooth. The same body I had brought into this marriage. We had been together more times than I could count now, in the shower and against the glass and on the floor of his study, and I had taken the real pills every morning and thrown the others away, and there was nothing. No fullness. No change. No sign at

all.

The dining area was empty when I came out, the table set for one.

“Marta. Where is Rieck?”

“Gone, ma’am. He left very early. Before five.”

“Five?” Rieck didn’t leave before eight. Rieck took his coffee at the glass and read on his phone and left at eight, every day. “Why so early?”

Marta hesitated, the way she hesitated when she knew a thing and was deciding whether it was hers to say.

“It is the news, ma’am. About the other Mr. Valerius. Dawson.” She kept her voice low. “He has gone into construction. Into the same business as Mr. Rieck. It was on every channel last night and again this morning. The whole office was called in early.”

I set my cup down slowly.

Dawson. In construction. In Rieck’s industry, the one thing Rieck had built with his own hands, the ground he stood on. Dawson, who had never built anything in his life, who saw the world as assets to be moved and people as assets to be spent, had walked into my husband’s trade with a television crew and a smile.

And an investor pulled out of my project the same afternoon with a better offer he wouldn’t name.

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16:12 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 46

A better client.

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It had been Dawson. Of course it was him. He didn’t just enter the industry. He reached into my project, my eastern site, and pulled out a leg of the table, he had done it on the same day he announced himself, so that the timing would land on Rieck like a fist.

No wonder Rieck told me to do nothing. This wasn’t a nervous investor I could charm back. This was a war between two men, and I had been standing in the middle of the battlefield with my folders, calling it a project.

I went to the hospital alone.

Not the surgery side. The other wing, the quiet one, where the soft-spoken doctor with grey at his temples kept his rooms. The same doctor who had stood with Rieck in a corridor and learned a thing about my heart he had been told to write on no chart. I trusted him more than I trusted anyone in this city, which wasn’t saying much, but it was something.

I told him I needed a pregnancy test. A real one. Blood, not a stick from a pharmacy.

He took the blood. He didn’t ask why a woman who had been shot ten days ago wanted to know if she was pregnant. He only looked at me a moment too long, and then he went away to run it.

I sat in the quiet room, waited and rubbed my thumb over my wedding band and told myself it would be fine. We had done everything right. I had thrown away the bad pills weeks ago. There had been more than enough chances. It would be fine. It had to be.

The doctor came back, and his face wasn’t fine.

“Mrs. Valerius.” He sat down across from me and set the page down between us, face up, so I could see the word on it myself. “The test is negative. You are not pregnant.”

I knew it from his face, but it still landed.

“Why?” I asked. “We have… there has been every opportunity. I stopped the vitamins. I have done everything I was supposed to do. Why is it not working?”

He folded his hands.

“That is the harder part,” he said gently. “May I be honest with you?”

“Please.”

“The supplements you were given for those two and a half years were not only a contraceptive. We knew that. What I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure is that a compound used that way, in those doses, over that length of time, doesn’t always switch off cleanly when a woman stops taking it. It can leave damage behind. In your case.” He paused. “In your case, the tests suggest it has.”

The room went very still.

“Damage?”

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16:12 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 46

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