Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 57

Chapter 57

Chapter 57

Aurelia’s POV

56

55 vouchers

The car pulled away and left me at the edge of a cold alley, and three streets down, the tower where I had once been a wife stood waiting.

The job was simple. That was what I kept telling myself. In through the back, up to the office, take the drive, come out. I would be long gone before anyone thought to look for a shadow that didn’t belong.

I didn’t know why Hebvron wanted the drive. He hadn’t told me, and I didn’t ask, because a man like him didn’t explain himself. All I had was the promise he had given me in that cold glass room.

“Bring me the drive,” he had said, “and it will more than answer for the child you can’t give us. It is the single thread that unravels Dawson. Pull it, and the whole man comes apart in your hands.”

I turned the words over until they stopped frightening me and started to steady me instead. A year ago I would have wept at the very thought of breaking into anywhere. A year ago I had wept at a great many things. But the woman in the dark window of a parked car across the street didn’t look like she wept at all, dark cap, dark coat, gloved hands, a stranger’s flat steady eyes. I almost didn’t know her.

Pulling the cap lower over my hair, I tucked the last loose strand out of sight, drew one slow breath of cold night air, and stepped out of the alley.

I knew this building the way you know a house you once lived in.

The service door at the back had always stuck in its frame. And it even stuck now.

I leaned my shoulder into it the way I had a hundred times before, carrying his dry cleaning, his lunch, his late apologies, and it gave with the same quiet groan, and then I was inside, in the grey concrete of the back stairs where the cameras had never once reached.

Up four floors. My breath loud in my own ears. The corridor at the top ran dark and empty, and at the end of it, behind a wall of black glass, his office waited.

I had found this back stair by accident in my first month as Mrs. Dawson Valerius, lost and overdressed and too shy to ask anyone the way. Back then it had felt like a small secret I was lucky to keep. But tonight it was a weapon he had handed me himself, without ever once knowing he held it out.

Dawson had never thought to take me out of the system. Of course he hadn’t. A man doesn’t trouble himself to delete a key he has stopped seeing. He had wiped me from his bed and his future and his plans without a second glance, and forgotten the one place I was still written in.

The lock.

I pressed my thumb to the cold pad beside the door. For one long breath nothing happened, and my heart climbed into my throat, and then the little light blinked from red to green and the door sighed open as though I had every right to walk through it. As though I had never left at all.

1/4

16:14 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter ST

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This was wiry Hebron had chosen me. Not my courage. Not my cleverness. My thumb. The print of a wife Dawson had thrown away and never bothered to erase.

His office smelled of him, scotch and cold smoke, and for a moment the smell alone almost undid me.

I stood in the dark and let it come over me, all of it at once, the late dinners I had kept warm, the nights I had waited up with the lights low, the slow and patient way I had loved a man who was already spending that love somewhere else. Then I breathed out long and quiet, and I left the woman who had done all that waiting behind me in the dark where she belonged

I crossed the room to the painting on the far wall the ugly expensive one he had loved more than most people, and I swung it aside on its hinge, and there it was. A second safe. A second cold pad.

I pressed my thumb to it and it opened. Inside, on a bed of black foam, sat a single small drive, no bigger than my finger. I closed my gloved hand around it and felt for the first time all night, something almost like joy.

“I have you.” I thought. Not the drive

Dawson

I was halfway down the back stairs when the voice cut through the dark.

“Stop right there.”

I froze. A guard stood on the landing below me, his gun already up, the barrel steady on my chest. I didn’t hear him come at all.

“Hands where I can see them he ordered. Turn around. Slowly

I could do many things on that stair, but I couldn’t do that one. The cap, the dark clothes, the gloves, all of it meant nothing the moment he saw my face, because a face could be named, and a name would run straight back to Rieck, to Hebron to the whole house of cards I was standing inside.

So I kept my back to him and my chin down and I said nothing.

He was ten steps below me with a clear shot. If I bolted he would fire. If I turned he would see. There was no clever third thing, no quiet trick, only a gun and a stranger and the small cold weight in my fist that I would die before I handed back

Then, far below us, somewhere deep in the building, a door banged open and footsteps broke into a run.

The guard’s head turned. Just a bit. Just for half a second.

So I ran

I went up, not down, away from his gun and his shouting, my legs burning, through a heavy door and along a black corndor I half remembered, down a different stair. faster than I had ever moved in my life.

My body was already very tired. My body had nothing left in it. But I made it go anyway.

24

16:14 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 57

56

55 vouchers

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