Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 50

Chapter 50

Chapter 50

Reick’s POV

No one had told me there was a meeting in my own building.

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I came off the elevator on the fortieth floor and the conference room was full through the glass wall. Twelve of my executives were already in their chairs, and not one of them had put the meeting on my calendar.

The cold came off me before I reached the door. I pushed it open and the room went quiet the way a room goes quiet when the wrong man walks in at the wrong moment.

“What is this?” I asked. “Who called a meeting in my company and didn’t tell me?”

“I did.”

The voice came from the head of the table.

My father sat in the executive chair. My chair. The silver cane was hooked over the arm of it, and his scarred face was turned to me calmly, the twelve men around the table had their eyes down on the wood because not one of them wanted to be looked at while the Alpha found his own father in his seat.

For a moment I didn’t have anything to say.

“Sit down, Rieck,” Hebvron ordered. “We were waiting for you.”

I didn’t sit at the head. There was no head left for me. I took the chair on his right, the chair that had been Tobias’s chair, the chair a second man sat in, and I felt every one of the twelve register it without lifting their faces.

“Gentlemen,” my father started, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Things are going to be different from today. We have a competitor in the market now. A serious one, with capital and intent and a personal reason to come at this family. The way we have run these last months has invited him in. But that ends today.” He laid his hand flat on the table. “I am going to walk you through the changes.”

He talked for forty minutes.

I sat in the chair and listened to my father restructure my company in front of my own men, and I said nothing, because to argue with him in that room would have told the twelve of them the one thing I couldn’t afford them to know, which was that the order of the pack had moved, and that I had let it move.

I caught him in the corridor after, away from the glass.

“You didn’t need to do that,” I said. “Any of it. I have it under control. Dawson is loud, but loud isn’t the same as winning. The meeting wasn’t needed and the changes weren’t needed, you embarrassed me in front of my own table to make a point you could have made to me alone.”

He stopped walking and turned on the cane.

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16:13 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 50

“Under control?” he asked.

“Yes.”

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“Rieck. Look at the last two months and tell me again, to my face, that you have had anything at all under control.” His voice stayed smooth, and that was how I knew how angry he was. “A rival Alpha walks through your territory and lays his scent on your wife in a shop. He puts a bullet in her on a street your own men didn’t have watched. He has men deep in the centre of your city with false papers, and you find out from a body in a basement. Your ex-cousin walks into your industry on television and pulls an investor out of a Valerius project in the same afternoon. And your wife…” He paused. “Your wife can’t give you a child, and you knew, and you said nothing to me, and you let me restructure my succession around a baby that was never coming.”

“Father, I…”

“I overestimated you.” He said it quietly, and it went in deeper than a shout would have gone. “I gave you a company and a contract and a simple task to anchor both, and you couldn’t complete the task. You can’t get your own wife pregnant, and yet you stand in a corridor and tell me you should be running an empire.” He let it sit. “Focus on the one thing I asked you for. Leave the company to men who can hold it. That is the new arrangement.”

I didn’t answer him. There was no answer that didn’t make it worse.

He walked past me to the elevator, and Arnell fell in behind him. I stood alone in the corridor of the building that had my name on the outside of it and a little less of my name on the inside of it than there had been that morning.

I understood it fully on the drive home, and the understanding sat in me like cold iron.

He was stripping me.

Not all at once. My father didn’t do things all at once. He did them the way he did everything, one quiet move at a time, a chair here, a meeting there, a sentence in a corridor, until a man looked up one day and found that the ground he thought he stood on belonged to someone else. He had started today. The seat at the head. The forty minutes. The new arrangement. And the reason for all of it, the lever he had used to move me out of my own chair, was a single line on a hospital page.

Because I couldn’t get my wife pregnant.

Because the woman I had married couldn’t carry a child, and that failure, which wasn’t mine and wasn’t even hers, was the crack my father had put his cane into to pry me loose.

The wolf in my chest had been quiet for three days. But it wasn’t quiet now. It paced the whole drive, and it wasn’t pacing for the company, and it wasn’t pacing for my father, and that was the thing I didn’t want to look at directly.

Somewhere in the last weeks the contract had stopped being the reason I went home. I went home for the sound of the shower, the vanilla and the small weight of her hand against my face in the dark. I had built a wall around a woman I told myself was an arrangement, and the wall had stopped being about the arrangement a long time ago.

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16:13 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 50

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I had been cold to her for three days. I had cancelled her project and put a guard on my door and let her cry alone on the other side of a wall I built, because reading that page had felt like a door closing, and I didn’t know how to stand in a room with a door closing and not turn to ice.

When the elevator opened into the penthouse, the apartment was dark.

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