Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 48

Chapter 48

Chapter 48

Aurelia’s POV

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I came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and saw the page on the bed.

I had left it there. I had carried it home folded inside my coat and taken it out to read one more time, like reading it again might change a word on it. And then the shower had pulled me in and I had left it lying open on the cover like a fool.

Crossing the room quickly, I snatched it up.

At that moment, my heart was going hard. I stood there with the page in my wet hands and listened to the

apartment.

It was quiet. The bedroom door was shut the way I had left it. No sound from the rest of the rooms. He wasn’t home. He couldn’t be home. If he were home, he would have come in, and the page had been face up, and…

I made myself stop.

He wasn’t home. I had got lucky.

I folded the report smaller than it wanted to fold, crossed to the dresser and put it under the lining paper at the bottom of my second drawer, beneath the grey shawl, where Marta didn’t reach when she tidied.

Rieck could never see this. Not this. The contract had one line in it that mattered, and this page said I couldn’t fulfil that line,the day Rieck read these words was the day the only thing keeping me in this house quietly stopped existing.

00000000000000

He came home after dark, and the cold came in with him.

I knew that cold. I had been learning it for weeks. The pressure of the rooms changed when Rieck was angry, the air went down a degree, and tonight it went down further than I had felt it go in a long time. I found him at the glass with his back to me and his jacket still on.

“You are home late,” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“Rieck. What’s wrong?”

He didn’t turn around.

I came a few steps closer and told myself it was Dawson. The man who had thrown me away two years ago had walked into my husband’s industry with a television crew, pulled an investor out of my project, and now the two of them were circling each other across the whole city. Rieck had every reason to stand at a window in the dark. This was about Dawson. It had to be about Dawson.

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16:13 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 48

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“It’s my ex-husband,” I mumbled. “Isn’t it? The construction news. He has come into your business on purpose, to hurt you, and he used me to do part of it, the investor, the timing, all of it. So tell me what you are going to do. Let me help. I know Dawson better than anyone alive. I was married to him for two years. There is no one in this city who can read him the way I can. Use that. Use me.”

For a moment he said nothing.

“There is nothing for you to do,” he finally said.

“Rieck, please. I…”

“Go to bed, Aurelia.”

His voice was flat and final and it didn’t invite a second try. I stood behind him a moment longer, looking at the line of his back against the dark glass, at the way he held his shoulders, and I told myself again that it was Dawson, because the other thing it might be was a thing I had just hidden under the lining of a drawer, and I couldn’t let myself believe he knew.

Without another word. I went to bed.

In the morning I went to the office, because work was the one thing in this life that was still mine, I sat down at my desk and opened the eastern site folder to start the day.

But the folder was wrong.

The schedule page had a stamp across it that hadn’t been there before. I read it twice and didn’t understand it, and read it again and did.

PROJECT CANCELLED.

I went still. I turned to my screen and pulled up the project file, and it was the same there, a grey banner across the top of the page, the eastern site closed, the contractors released, the delivery date that I had refused to let a gun wound move now struck through with a single clean line.

Cancelled. Not delayed. Not handed to someone else. Killed.

My project. The one he had given me. The one I had walked the ground of with a bullet barely out of my chest. Gone overnight, with no call, no warning, no word from the man who had given it to me and the man who had just taken it away.

I stood up so fast my shoulder caught and burned.

I went down the corridor to his office.

There was a guard at the door.

There had never been a guard at this door. Elara sat outside Rieck’s office, severe and silent, and people went in when he allowed them and waited when he didn’t, but there had never, in all the weeks I had come to this building, been a man standing across the door itself.

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Chapter 48

He stepped into my path before I reached the handle.

“Ma’am.”

“Move, please. I need to see my husband.”

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