Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 54

Chapter 54

Chapter 54

Aurelia’s POV

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Watching Dawson fall had felt like the first cool sip of water after a long drought. But the trouble with one sip is that it only shows you how thirsty you really are.

Sitting alone in the dark of the penthouse, I watched the clip of him one more time on my phone. The stumble. The wheeling arms. The great Dawson Valerius blinking at a room that had stopped loving him.

It should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

I wanted more. I wanted all of it. I wanted to take everything he had built on my swallowed years and burn it to the ground while he watched.

I thought of the things I knew by heart now. The little white pills he had folded into my vitamins morning after morning, smiling at me across the table while he kept me empty. The smell of sickly lilies on his collar the nights he swore he was only working late. The bored, faraway look on his face at our last anniversary, as though I were a chair he had already wanted to replace.

At that moment, the door opened and I felt him before I saw him.

The air in the room changed, the way it always did when Rieck came home, a small drop in the temperature, a weight settling over everything at once. Sandalwood and cold rain. My thoughts scattered like startled birds.

He stood in the doorway with his coat still on and a look on his face I couldn’t read, cold and flat and turned fully on me

I stood up and the words came out before I could stop them. “I’m sorry. For the other night. For making you come after me, for the worry, for all of it.” I twisted my wedding band. “I shouldn’t have gone.”

“No apology needed.”

I blinked, “What?”

“I don’t want one.” He came into the room slowly, his eyes never leaving my face. “What you did was clever. You walked into that man’s house with nothing but a borrowed name and brought him to his knees in front of the whole city. I have men who couldn’t have done it half so cleanly.”

The praise startled me more than anger would have.

“But it was also stupid, he went on, and his voice dropped low. “You went in alone. No plan past the door. No way out if it turned. And it nearly did turn, on a dark street, with two men’s hands on you.” He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes. “Hear me, little wife. Revenge is a fire. Get careless with it and it stops caring whose house it burns. Yours included.”

“I don’t care

It came out flat and sure, and I watched it land.

I don’t said again I want him to pay, Rieck For Charlotte. For the lies. For two years of pills he fed me to

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Chapter 54

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keep me empty and quiet. Heir or no heir, contract or no contract, I am going to make Dawson Valerius wish . he had never once touched my life.”

The room went very still.

Rieck looked at me then in a way he never had before. Not cold. Not bored. Something behind his pale eyes had sharpened and gone bright.

It should have frightened me. Some part of it did. But I didn’t look away, and neither did he, and the quiet stretched between us until it felt too tense.

“What?” I mumbled. “Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking?”

For a long moment he said nothing. Then the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile.

“I’m thinking,” he said, “that I never knew a woman could be this vengeful, and still look so soft while she said it.”

Morning came, and Rieck was dressed before I was, sharp and awake, when he told me to get ready.

“Something simple,” he said. “You are coming with me.”

I pushed the hair from my face. “Coming where?”

“The office.”

I stared at him. For days he had wanted me nowhere near that building. He had cancelled my project, put a guard on his own door, looked through me as though I were a stranger he had grown tired of finding in his home. Now he stood there and told me to dress for it as if none of that had happened.

“Why?” I asked. “Three days ago you wouldn’t let me past the lobby. Now you want me in it. Why?”

“You will find out at the office.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one you are getting.” He turned for the door. “Ten minutes.”

He left me standing there in the grey light. I dressed the way he had asked, something simple, a soft charcoal dress and flat shoes, and I watched my own hands in the mirror choose the quiet version of myself, the one that gave nothing away.

Whatever was waiting at that office, I didn’t want to walk into it looking like a woman who had spent the night being kept in the dark. Even though I had.

The convoy moved through the grey morning streets, three black cars in a quiet line, and I sat beside him in the back with a hundred questions pressing at my teeth.

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Chapter 54

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I picked the smallest one. “Is this about Dawson? Because if it is, I can help. I know him better than anyone alive, his habits, his weak spots, the people he…”

“If what you are about to say is useful, say it.” Rieck didn’t look up from his phone. “If it’s only noise to fill the quiet, keep it. I have no patience this morning for talk that leads nowhere.”

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