Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 61

Chapter 61

Chapter 61

Rieck’s POV

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For three days my wife had been missing, and the first words out of my father’s mouth that morning were about a piece of plastic.

“We need that drive, Rieck.” He sat behind his desk with his hands folded, calm as a man remarking on the weather. “Whatever else has happened, that has not changed. The drive is the whole of it. Without it, every cent and every move we have spent on Dawson is wasted.”

I stood in the middle of his study and looked at him, and for a long moment I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“She has been gone for three days,” I said at last. “Taken. Bleeding, when they took her. A wolf carried her across my border and out of my reach, and you sit there and talk to me about the drive.”

“The drive is in Kaelen’s hands now, or close enough. Which means it is leverage I no longer hold and he very well might.” He didn’t blink. “So yes. I am talking about the drive. Someone in this family has to keep his head while you lose yours.”

“My head is exactly where it belongs.”

“Your head,” he said, “is in a mountain house three hundred miles north, pining after a contract bride.” He leaned back in his chair. “Bring me the drive. If the girl happens to come with it, all the better. But don’t confuse the two, Rieck. Only one of them matters.”

“You gave me your word,” I scoffed. “On the night I married her. That she would be protected.”

“I gave you my word that she would be useful,” he answered, unbothered. “And she has been. That is a different promise, and you knew the difference when you put your name to it.”

I had heard my father say cold things my whole life. And I had said many myself. But something in the way he talked about Aurelia turned the whole room thin and white at the edges.

I didn’t answer him. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t end with one of us on the floor.

So I turned and walked out, and I let the door speak for me when it slammed.

Back at the tower, I sat at my desk and got nothing done at all.

Reports waited. Calls stacked up. Elara came and went with that expression she wore around me now, the one a person uses on a man they are no longer sure of, and I signed whatever she set in front of me without reading a single line. She asked me twice whether I wanted the Marston file reopened. The second time I told her to get out, and she got out.

Every part of me was three hundred miles north.

I knew where she was now. That was the one mercy in three days of hell. My men had traced the cars, the back roads, the cold trail leading out of the city, and every thread had tied off in the same place.

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Chapter 61

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Ridgeline. Kaelen’s ground. The Wilder had carried my wife into his own mountains, where my name meant nothing.

I thought of her up there. Alone. Surrounded by his people, his walls, his rules. I thought of him turning those gold eyes on what was mine, and suddenly the wolf in me got up snarling until my hands shook flat on the desk.

She wasn’t an asset. She wasn’t a drive, or a clause, or a chip my father could spend and replace at his leisure. She was mine, by every word I had spoken over her, and I had let her be taken because I had been too proud and too greedy to keep her home where she was safe.

Tobias came to me at noon with a roll of paper under his arm and a grim set to his jaw.

He spread it across my desk and weighted the corners with whatever was nearest. A map. Ridgeline, drawn in clean grey lines, every wall and gate and mountain road a man could ask for.

“It took some doing to get this,” he said. “It’s not complete. But it’s enough to see the shape of the problem.” He set a blunt finger on the page and walked me through it. The outer fence. The patrol roads. The single pass through the mountains. The house itself, high on the ridge, ringed on three sides by a drop no man would ever walk away from.

“Here,” he said. “And here. These two are the only ways in that are not just a climb. Both watched. Both narrow. Both sitting exactly where he would want us to come, because there is nowhere else to go.” He tapped the switchback road that climbed the face of the ridge in long open zigzags, and the guard rotations marked along it in faded pencil. “Anything on that road stays in the open the whole way up. They would see us coming for an hour before we arrived.” He straightened. “I will be plain with you, sir. Going in quiet is a bad idea. This is not Dawson’s office tower. This is an Alpha’s seat, full of his own kind, and they will catch our scent on the wind a mile out. We send men over that fence and we are sending them to die, and we still don’t come home with her.”

I looked at the map for a long time. The walls. The pass. The killing drop. The one narrow road Kaelen wanted me to use.

I had spent three days throwing myself at walls in my own mind. Rage was no use to her. Rage was the very thing Kaelen was counting on, the wounded husband flinging his men at a fence in the dark, loud and easy to see and easy to put down. He had built that whole approach to catch the exact man I had been since the gunshot.

So I would stop being that man.

“You are right,” I said. “We are not going over the fence.”

Tobias frowned. “Then how do we….”

“Because he is not going to make me climb anything in the dark.” I stood, and for the first time in three days the floor felt steady under my feet. “He wants me to come at him like a thief, at night, on his ground and on his terms. So I am going to give him the one thing he has not prepared for.”

And what is that, sir?”

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16:15 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 61

56

55 vouchers

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