Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 52

Chapter 52

Chapter 52

Rieck’s POV

The man had his hand on my wife and that was all it took.

1 stepped out of the dark.

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Take your hand off her.” My voice came out low, and the street seemed to drop a few degrees around it. “Do it now, and you keep the hand. Touch her again, and you will never touch anything again.”

Both men turned and whatever they saw in my face drained the colour from theirs. The taller one let go of her so quickly he nearly tripped over his own feet, and the air between us went thick and heavy.

“Mr. Valerius,” the shorter one whispered. “Sir, we didn’t know who she was.”

“I don’t repeat myself.”

They stepped back. And they kept stepping back until the wall of the hotel stopped them.

Aurelia turned to face me. Her eyes were wide open, her face pale, and her scent reached me before anything else did, the smell I could have found in a city of a million people.

Under it tonight sat something sour. Scotch. Smoke. The party she had no reason on earth to be at.

“How,” she breathed, “are you here?”

I didn’t answer. I never explain myself, and I wasn’t going to start on a wet pavement with two frightened men listening.

I put my hand at the small of her back and turned her toward the car at the curb. Ronan already had the door

open.

“Get in,” I ordered.

She didn’t move at first. She stood on the wet stone with the noise of the party still spilling out behind her, looking at me as though I were a stranger, or a ghost, or both. Then she got in.

She didn’t say one word the whole way home.

And neither did I, because if I opened my mouth I wasn’t sure what would come out. I had driven over there sure I would find her hurt, or worse.

I had come home tonight to a penthouse with every light off and her phone dead on the nightstand, still plugged into a charger that had quit hours before. Marta had only spread her hands. I had called Tobias, then Ronan, then no one at all, because there was no one left to call.

In the end I had found her the only way I trusted, the way I had sworn to myself I would never need, by the

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Chapter 52

thin thread of her scent through a city that did everything it could to bury it.

The penthouse was dark and cold when we walked in and I didn’t turn on the lights.

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“What were you doing there.” It wasn’t a question. “At an event thrown by that man. In a dress I have never

seen.”

She set her bag down on the white leather and wouldn’t look at me. “I went to observe. That’s all.”

I had been told lies by better liars than my little wife, and I knew the taste of one in the air. Her heart had skipped a beat on the word observe. Her fingers had found her wedding band and twisted it.

“You went to observe?”

“Yes.”

I waited for the rest. There was always a rest. People filled my quiet with the truth because the quiet frightened them more than I ever did.

Aurelia only lifted her chin. “Is that all? I would like to go to bed.”

I should have been angry. By every law I lived by, I had the right to it. But here she stood, unhurt, lying to my face, and somehow the anger in the room belonged to her.

She turned and walked away from me, down the hallway, and a door closed in the dark.

Did I do wrong, I wondered, by going after her at all.

She hadn’t asked me to come. She hadn’t thanked me. She had looked at me as though I were the one who had wronged her tonight.

Elara came into my office the next morning wearing a look I had never seen on her.

She looked, for once, almost excited. My assistant didn’t do excited. She did cold, and exact, and a half step ahead of me, and she called me the Alpha in a tone that made the word sound like a job title.

“Have you seen the news?” she said.

“What news?”

She lifted the remote from my desk and turned on the screen across the room.

A headline filled it in hard red letters. DRUNK CEO. Beneath it the footage played on a loop. Dawson on a bright stage in his white jacket, glass in hand, the smooth golden face of the city’s newest success story. Then his words sliding into mush. Then his foot going off the edge of the stage, his arms wheeling, the podium shrieking sideways as he caught himself and nearly went down in front of every camera in the room.

They are running it on every channel,” Elara said. “His stock opened down this morning. Only a little. But it dropped She paused. “A man like that doesn’t get to look weak in public. Not in this city.”

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Chapter 32

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