Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 49

Chapter 49

Chapter 49

Aurelia’s POV

Three days passed, and my husband became a stranger I lived beside.

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He left before I woke up. He came home after the city went dark, if he came home at all. Two of those three nights his side of the bed stayed flat and cold, and the one night he did come back, he slept in the study with the door shut and the lamp on until morning. When we passed each other in the hallway, he looked at me the way a man looked at a piece of furniture he hadn’t yet decided what to do with.

I had stopped asking. Every question I put to him came back the same. “Nothing. Go to bed. There’s nothing for you to do.”

That third evening I sat at the long dining table with a plate Marta had set in front of me an hour ago, and I couldn’t lift the fork.

The food had gone cold. I had pushed it from one side of the plate to the other and back, and the smell of it had stopped being food and started being a thing I was failing at, like everything else.

Marta came in quietly and stood beside my chair.

“You haven’t eaten in two days, ma’am,” she said. “Properly. I see the plates.”

“I’m not hungry.”

She didn’t leave. She pulled out the chair beside mine, sat in it, and folded her worn hands on the table.

“You are too hard on yourself,” she started. “I have watched it for three days. Whatever has happened between you and the Alpha, you are carrying all of it as if it is yours to carry alone.” She paused. “He is a difficult man. I have worked in this house for nine years, and I will not pretend to you that he is easy. The cold. The quiet. The way he goes away inside himself. But he isn’t a cruel man, ma’am. I have seen cruel men, and he isn’t one. He is a good man who learned a long time ago not to let anyone see it. Give him room. He will come back.”

I looked at her worn, kind face, and my throat went tight.

“Thank you, Marta,” I whispered.

I didn’t believe her. But I was grateful for it anyway.

The elevator buzzed at nine, and the cold came in before he did.

I got up from the table before I even decided to. I met him in the living room with the city black behind the glass, I was tired of three days of nothing, and the thing in my chest was past being careful.

“You won’t even look at me,” I said. “Three days, Rieck. You canceled my project. You put a guard on your own door to keep me out. You sleep in your study. And you won’t tell me why. I’m your wife. Whatever this is, I’ve earned the right to hear it from you.”

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Chapter 49

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He turned. His eyes had gone the polished cold they get when he’s decided something and won’t be argued out of it.

“You want to know what this is?”

“Yes.”

“None of this would be happening,” he mumbled, “if you had told me the truth. About your body. About what you can and can’t do. I built the last weeks of my life around a thing you knew you couldn’t give me, and you let me. You let my father believe it. You let me believe it.”

The floor dropped out from under the words.

“What… what are you…”

“You can’t have children, Aurelia. You’ve known it. And you said nothing.”

“I’m not infertile.” It came out quickly, too loud, my hand already rising to my chest. “I’m not. Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong. There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s the vitamins. It’s what Dawson did. The contraceptive… it built up over two years and it hasn’t… it hasn’t cleared. That’s all it is. It’s not me. It’s what he did to me.”

“I know what it is.”

“Then you know it is not my…”

“I read the report.”

The room immediately went silent.

“I read it, Aurelia. The hospital page. The one you left on the bed and then hid in your drawer. Chances of conception very low. Possibly none. I read every word of it before you came out of the shower.” His voice didn’t rise. That was the worst of it. “So don’t stand in my living room and tell me there’s nothing wrong. I have seen the paper. I have known for three days. The only person in this marriage who has been lied to is me.”

At that moment, I couldn’t breathe. The page. The drawer. He had read it before I had ever hidden it. He had known that night, the cold that came in with him, all of it, he had already known.

“Rieck…” My voice broke on it. “I was going to…”

Just then his phone rang.

He looked at the screen. It was the office. Elara’s line. He looked at me, and for half a second something moved behind the cold, something that was almost the man Marta swore was in there, and then it was gone and he lifted the phone to his ear.

“Yes.” There was a pause. His jaw tightened. “I’m coming.”

He lowered the phone. He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t say anything at all. He just turned and walked to the elevator, and the doors opened for him. He stepped inside without looking back at me, and the cold went out

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