Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 59

Chapter 59

Chapter 59

Aurelia’s POV

I woke up suddenly with a sharp gasp.

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White ceiling. White walls. A narrow bed that wasn’t mine, in a room that wasn’t mine, and a smell in the air that was… weird. Sitting up, the world tilted and a dull pain throbbed in the back of my forehead.

My hand went up and my fingers found a bandage wound tight around my head.

I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know how I had come to be here. The last thing I had, when I reached for it, was a green light at the end of a long hallway, a shot, and arms carrying me as the dark closed over my head. After that, nothing. A clean blank.

How long had I been out? An hour? A day?

I made myself look, the way I had taught myself to look at things. It was a laboratory. A real one. Glass cabinets along one wall, neat rows of bottles and instruments behind them. A machine beside the bed drawing my heartbeat in soft green lines. Tubes. A tray of folded gauze.

This wasn’t a hospital. Hospitals were never this quiet, and never this…. hidden.

Just then the door opened and a woman came in, maybe forty, in a white coat with her dark hair pinned back and a tablet tucked under one arm. She smiled when she saw me sitting up, and the smile looked real enough.

“You’re awake. Good. I was beginning to think you meant to sleep through the whole week.” She set the tablet down. “I am Doctor Saltzman. Sonia, if you prefer. Saltzman makes me sound like my own mother.”

“Where am I?” My voice came out cracked. “How long have I been here?”

“One question at a time.” She raised a cup of water into my hand and waited until I drank. “You are in Ridgeline. And you have been asleep for three days.”

“What?”

“You lost a great deal of blood,” Sonia went on. “The cut on your head was the least of it. You are lucky. If the Alpha had brought you in an hour later, I am not sure there would have been much for me to do.”

I went very still. “The… Alpha?”

“Kaelen.” She said the name respectfully. “He carried you in himself, three nights ago, bleeding through a coat worth more than my car. He has asked after you every day since.” She picked the tablet back up. “And he is waiting for you now. Can you stand?”

Kaelen. The rival. The Wilder. The huge tawny stranger with the gold eyes who had crashed Rieck’s gala a lifetime ago and told me I was standing on the losing side.

He had taken me. He had carried me out of Dawson’s building and across the dark, and I had thought, fool that I was, that the arms around me belonged to my husband.

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16:14 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 59

“Yes,” I said softly. “I can stand.”

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They had built something beautiful in Ridgeline, and I hated that I even noticed.

Sonia walked me down a hallway of pale stone and dark wood, and through the tall windows I saw the world outside, mountains, real ones, white at the peaks and dark with pine below, going on and on.

The breakfast room opened onto the mountains, and a man sat at the head of a long table with the whole white morning at his back.

He was even larger than I remembered. Tawny hair pushed back from a hard face, a pale scar running down across one cheek, and eyes the strange gold of a thing that hunts at dusk. His scent reached me from across the room, pine and cold snow, and to my shame it didn’t frighten me the way it should have. It tugged at me instead, low and strange, like a word I had forgotten I knew.

He looked up, and a slow grin spread over his face.

“Well,” he said, his voice big enough to fill the room without trying. “The sleeping beauty is finally awake.”

“You took me.” I didn’t sit. “You carried me out of that building.”

“I did.” He gestured at the chair across from him as though we were old friends meeting for a meal. “You are welcome, by the way. You were leaking rather badly at the time.”

“Why were you there?” I stayed on my feet. “That was Rieck’s territory. His city. What were you doing inside

it?”

He shrugged. “I had an invitation. A meeting, dull as ditchwater, the kind powerful men call right before they try to cut each other’s throats over coffee. I was only passing through when I heard the noise. Gunfire has a way of catching my interest.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The grin only widened, delighted, as though I had passed some small test. “No. I didn’t think you would.”

“So you slip in and out of other men’s territories whenever it suits you?”

“I’m wherever I need to be,” he said, and there was no boast in it. He nudged a plate towards the empty seat. “Now sit. Eat. It took my doctor three days to put the blood back into you. Don’t waste it letting good food go cold.”

I don’t know why I sat. Maybe because my legs were still weak under me. Maybe because some part of me, the part I didn’t trust, wanted to stay near that strange pull a little longer.

I had barely touched the fork when another man came through a side door, young and hard faced, and bent

to whisper something low against Kaelen’s ear. I heard none of it. But whatever it was, the grin slid off Kaelen’s face, and for one breath I saw the thing that lived under the charm, still and cold and very old.

He suddenly stood up.

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16:14 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 59

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