Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 56

Chapter 56

Chapter 56

Rieck’s POV

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I had signed plans that sent men to their deaths and felt nothing by lunch. I had ended careers over coffee and forgotten the names before the cup was empty. So I didn’t understand why one sheet of my father’s strategy, sitting on my desk since dawn, wouldn’t let me work.

It was a good plan. The kind I would have admired in any other mouth. Use the asset we had. Send the clever little wife back toward Dawson, where her petty face and her quick hands could do what none of my men ever could. She had already walked into his world before and brought him down. My father only wanted to point that talent at a larger target.

The trouble was the part the plan stated plainly and didn’t dwell on. To get that close to Dawson now, with the man wounded and watching every shadow, was to stand inside arm’s reach of something cornered. And cornered things bite.

She would be exposed. No wall of mine around her. No convoy at the curb. Just Aurelia, alone, in the open, with men who had already put their hands on her once.

I had briefed her myself the night before, flat and exact, the way I would brief Tobias before sending him across the line. She had listened without flinching. She asked three sharp questions, all of them good, and when I finished she only nodded, as though I had handed her a grocery list and not a road that ran straight through the heart of the man who had broken her.

That calm should have pleased me, but it didn’t.

My father was smoking when I found him.

He always was. Hebvron Valerius had outlived two wives, a dozen rivals, and every doctor who ever told him to put it down, and he sat now in his study with a cigar burning slowly between two fingers. The room smelled the way it always smelled. Smoke and old leather and money that had long ago stopped needing to prove

itself.

“You have a face on you,” he said, without looking up. “Sit. Tell me which part of a sound plan has put that look there.”

I didn’t sit.

“The plan is bad,” I blurted. “It puts her too far out. No cover. No way to pull her back if it turns. You are sending a woman with no training into the middle of a man who has nothing left to lose, and you are calling it strategy.”

He drew on the cigar and let the smoke out slowly, watching me through it.

“Her,” he mumbled. “Not the plan. Her.” A thin smile moved the scar on his cheek. “You have said her name more in one breath than you have said anything in a year. My son. You are attached.”

“Don’t”

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16:14 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 56

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“You have feelings for the girl.” He said it the way another man might note a crack in a wall, mild, and faintly pleased to have found the flaw. “How very interesting. I didn’t think you had the equipment left in you for it.”

At that moment, the temperature in the room dropped. I felt the cold come off me before I could stop it, and my father felt it too, because his eyes sharpened with something close to delight.

“Calm down,” he whispered. “You will frost my windows.”

“She is a person,” I said slowly. “Not a thing you spend.”

“Everything is a thing you spend. That is what ownership means.” He set the cigar in its dish. The contract was never about her comfort, Rieck. It was about one thing only. We strip Dawson Valerius of all that he holds, and we do it by whatever road takes us there fastest. If the road runs through her, then it runs through her.”

“Even if it costs her life?”

“Yes.”

He said it without heat and without cruelty, the way he said everything that truly mattered.

“Unless,” he went on, and now he looked at me fully, “you would rather I struck your name from the inheritance and handed the north to someone with the stomach for the work. That can be done before supper. One signature. You would keep the girl, and lose every other thing you have ever been promised.” He spread his hands. “Choose.”

I thought of all of it. The territory. The name. The long brutal years of being shaped into the only thing my father had ever respected. I thought of signing it over to some lesser cousin because I couldn’t stomach a risk I took with other lives every week without blinking.

I wouldn’t lose it. Not for this. Not for anyone.

“Fine,” I shrugged.

“Good.” My father picked the cigar back up. “Go home to your wife.”

She was on the long couch when I came in, a glass of red wine untouched in her hand.

She didn’t hear me at first. She was staring at nothing, the way people do when they are turning a frightening thing over and over behind their eyes.

I crossed to her and sat close. And in that moment, the thing in me that I kept chained through every daylight hour wanted just one simple stupid thing. To put my own body between her and every dark corner of this city, and to stay there, and to let the plan and my father and the whole north of the family fall.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

The words came out strange in my own ears, because I had never once offered a living soul a way out of anything People did what I told them to do. That was the order of the world, and I had built my life on it.

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Chapter 56

“If you don’t want to,” I continued, “then you don’t do it. Say the word and it ends here. Tonight.”

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