Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 63

Chapter 63

Chapter 63

Rieck’s POV

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Kaelen didn’t shrink back. He never did. He stood across from me, that pale scar down his cheek, and he smiled as though I had told him a mildly amusing joke.

“Careful,” he smirked. “Careful what you wish for, Valerius. A war is a great deal easier to start than it is to end. And you are standing in my house while you wish for it.”

“I know exactly what I wish for.” I didn’t move. “And the longer you stand there playing games, the more likely it is you get it. Every minute you keep her from me is a minute closer to the thing you ought to be afraid of.”

He studied me, those gold eyes moving over my face.

“You know,” he added slowly, “I had heard a curious thing about this little arrangement of yours. That the girl is a vessel. Nothing more. A womb with a contract pinned to it, brought in to give your father an heir and spite a cousin.” He took a step, unhurried. “And yet here you are. The great cold Rieck Valerius, who feels nothing and wants nothing, three hundred miles from home and threatening a war over a vessel.”

“Watch yourself.”

“She is more than a vessel to you.” His grin spread wide and knowing. “Well, well. Look at that. The coldest wolf in the north has finally gone and fallen in love. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Don’t test my patience, Kaelen.”

He stepped closer still, near enough that one wrong breath would end in blood on his floor.

“Or you will do what?” he said softly.

“He will do nothing.”

The voice came from above and behind him, clear and steady.

It was Aurelia.

She stood at the top of the wide stair, one hand on the rail, pale and bandaged and alive. Looking down at us as though she had wandered into a squabble between boys.

She came down the steps slowly, holding the rail, and crossed the hall to stand between two men who could have brought the roof down, like it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

“Thank you, Kaelen,” she said, and to my rage she sounded as though she meant it. “For the bed, and the doctor, and the food. You were a far kinder host than you had any reason to be.” Then she turned to me, and her tired eyes found mine, and she said the four best words I had heard in my life. “Time to go, husband.”

I didn’t let myself reach for her. Not there. Not in front of him. I just stepped back and she moved closer.

Kaelen watched us with that same lazy smile, though it didn’t reach his eyes now.

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16:15 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 63

“Before you go,” he said.

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He crossed to her, ignoring the growl that climbed up out of me, and he took her hand and pressed something small into the palm of it. I caught it as her fingers closed. A drive. The drive

“This belongs to you, I believe,” he whispered, watching her face and not mine. “It would be poor manners to send a guest home without her things.”

“You… you had it?” Aurelia asked, looking shocked.

“We will meet again,” Kaelen said to her. Only to her. “You and I. Sooner than you would think.

Then he smiled, and stepped back, and let us walk out his door.

I didn’t say a word until the mountains were behind us and my own border ran under the wheels.

“I knew this was a bad idea.” The words came out hard, my hands tight on the wheel. From the first night my father laid it out for me, I knew. I should have torn the plan up and locked you in the penthouse and let him take every acre I own.”

“Rieck…”

“What were you doing in his territory, Aurelia? How does a woman vanish out of Dawson’s building and un up three hundred miles north in the one house in this country I can’t set foot in

She was quiet for a moment. Then, “Kaelen saved me.”

I looked across at her. “What?”

“In the building. The masked man, the one who shoved me clear of the shot and carried me out into the dark. It was never you.” She watched me take the weight of it. ‘It was him. He was there. Rieck Inside Dawson’s tower, the same night, the same hour. He pulled me out of that hallway and he kept me alive.”

I drove on in silence while that settled into me.

Kaelen had been there. Inside my city, inside Dawson’s building, on the exact night of the exact job, close enough to save her as she fell. That wasn’t luck. That was reach. His eyes and ears ran deeper into my world than I had ever let myself believe, and that frightened me more than any word he had spoken in his hall

“He knew,” I said. “About the drive. The job. All of it.”

“I think he knows a great deal more than he ever says.” She reached into her coat and held out her hand. On her palm lay the small black drive, the thing that had cost us all so much. ‘Here. Take it. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”

We had barely cleared the door of the penthouse when my father came in behind us

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Chapter 63

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He didn’t knock. He never knocked. He came in on his cane with Arnell a step behind him, and his eyes went straight to Aurelia, to the bandage, to the worn-thin state of her, and then to me, reading the whole room in a single breath.

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