Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 47

Chapter 47

Chapter 47

Rieck’s POV

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The third site of the morning was twenty floors of bare concrete against a grey sky, and I was standing in the half-built lobby checking a steel schedule with Vance when I caught the scent of scotch and money coming across the open floor.

I knew it before I turned.

Dawson stepped out of a glass-walled meeting room with three men in good suits behind him. The kind of men who carried chequebooks instead of opinions. He was in white, of course. A white coat over a dark shirt, a cigarette already between his fingers even with the no-smoking sign right behind his head. He saw me and he smiled the smile he had been smiling at me since we were boys.

“Cousin,” he called out. He came across the floor without hurrying. “I didn’t know you toured your own buildings. I thought you had people for that.”

“What are you doing on this site, Dawson?”

“Looking at property. It’s a free market.” He drew on the cigarette and looked up at the bare ceiling as if he were pricing it. “So this is construction. Dust. Noise. Men in hats. I can see the appeal.” He smiled again. “How is business, by the way? I hear it’s been an interesting week for you. An investor here, an investor there. They do get nervous, don’t they, when there’s a better offer in the room.”

The wolf in my chest growled at that moment.

“You will regret this,” I said.

“Regret what?”

“Coming into my industry. Men have tried it before you. Some of them aren’t in this city anymore. Some of them are in cells. One or two are nowhere at all. You think you have walked onto soft ground because it has my name on it. You have walked onto the one piece of ground I will burn the city down to keep.”

He had the nerve to look amused.

“See, that’s the difference between us,” he scoffed. “You think this is about ground. Territory. Wolves and walls.” He tapped ash on the clean concrete of my lobby. “It’s about money, cousin. It’s always only about money. And I’m just a better businessman than you are. I always have been. I’ll be a perfect competitor. You’ll see.”

“Enjoy your tour,” I said. Then I turned my back on him, which was the only insult he ever understood, and I walked away before my wolf could decide how the morning ended.

My father called me to his study an hour later. It smelled like cigar smoke and leather, and it had the cold of a man who was no longer sure he was winning.

“He’s consolidating.” Hebvron said before I even sat. “Construction was the last clean sector I held over him. Now he’s in it, with capital I can’t match overnight. And the board can see it. Do you understand what it

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Chapter 47

means when the board can see a thing?”

“I understand.”

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“Then understand this too.” He turned from the window. “I need the heir, Rieck. Not soon. Now. It’s the only card left on the table that he can’t buy. A male child of my line resets the whole board. Without it, I’m just an old man with a son and a daughter-in-law and no future.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“Tell me she’s pregnant,” he said.

I had lied to him in this room before. The lie had bought me weeks, and the weeks had cost me more than the truth would have. But I was tired of carrying it.

“No,” I spat. “She’s not.”

The room went quiet.

“She’s not pregnant, Father. There has been no child. There is no child coming that I know of. I told you there was, weeks ago, and it wasn’t true, and I have let you believe it since.”

I waited for the cane. But to my surprise, it didn’t come.

“Thank you,” Hebvron said quietly, “for telling me the truth. It’s more than your wife managed. A staircase.” He shook his head slowly. “A grown woman, falling down a flight of gym stairs with the laundry. When the truth is that someone put a bullet in her chest in an alley on the south side, and she walked out alive only because of where her heart sits.”

The floor moved under me at that moment.

I kept my face still. I had spent thirty years keeping my face still. But he saw it. He always saw it.

“You didn’t think I knew,” he smirked. “Son. There’s nothing that happens in this city that I don’t know within a day of it happening. The shooting. The basement. The two of your men in the cold ground. The mark on the wrists of the others.” He let every word land. “I let you handle it because handling it is your job. But don’t ever again sit in a room with me and let your wife’s lie stand as though I am a fool to be managed.”

“Father. I…”

“Get me an heir, Rieck. However you have to. Or I will start to think about the board the way Dawson thinks about it. As a thing to be solved with the pieces I have left.”

He walked out of his own study and left me standing in it, and I knew, from the set of his back, exactly how angry he was, because he hadn’t raised his voice once.

The penthouse was warm when I got home, and the shower was running.

I could hear it through the bedroom door, the soft fall of water, and under the door the air smelled like

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Chapter 47

vanilla and steam.

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As I went into the bedroom to take off my jacket, there was a folded page on the bed.

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