Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 65

Chapter 65

Chapter 65

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Dawson let his phone ring twice before he answered, because a man who picks up on the first ring is a man who is afraid.

“Mr. Valerius. The voice was calm, dry, unhurried, a patient man’s voice. “Detective Jones. I’m sorry to call so late. Some new information has come to light regarding the incident at your building, and I would like you to come in. The Special Investigation Department. Tonight, if you can manage it.”

“Information?” Dawson kept his own voice bored. “What sort?”

The useful sort. I would rather show you than tell you over the phone. It will not take long.”

The line went dead before he could decide whether to refuse.

He sat with the phone in his hand for a moment.

Special Investigation. Not some tired precinct sergeant chasing a break-in. Someone had carried his dead guard up the ladder to the people who didn’t let go of things.

A detective with new information was the very last thing he needed tonight. The trick now would be to learn what they had without showing them a single bit of what he was hiding, to walk in looking like a wronged man and walk back out having given them nothing at all.

He stood up and straightened his jacket.

“Finish what is on my desk,” he told his assistant on the way past. “Sign what can be signed in my name. I am going out.”

The Special Investigation Department was all grey carpet and buzzing lights, and Detective Jones turned out to be a lean grey man with tired eyes and a way of looking at Dawson as though he had already read the last page of him.

“Thank you for coming.” He didn’t offer coffee. He led Dawson into a small room with a screen on the wall and waved him into a chair. “I won’t waste your evening. We pulled this from a camera two streets from your building. It is the only clean frame we managed to get.”

He tapped a key and the screen turned on.

A figure was caught walking under a streetlight. Dark clothes, a dark cap, shoulders squared, the build lost under a heavy coat. It could have been anyone. If anything, it looked like a slim young man hurrying home in the cold.

“A man?” Dawson said. “So you dragged me across the city to show me a man in a coat.”

“No.” Jones didn’t look at the screen. He was staring at Dawson’s face. “That is what you see, and what everyone sees, and it is wrong. Look at the hips. The length of the step. The way the weight settles when the foot lands.” He let the frame hang there. “That is a woman, Mr. Valerius. A woman who has gone to a great deal of trouble to walk like a man. I have done this for thirty years. I would stake my pension on it.”

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Chapter 65

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Something turned over coldly in Dawson’s chest, but he held his face still.

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He was already running the list behind his eyes, every woman with a reason to want him ruined. It was a longer list than he would have liked. But not one name on it had the first idea how to cross a guarded floor in the dark without leaving a smear of herself behind for a man like Jones to find.

“A woman, then. Wonderful. You have narrowed it down to half the city.”

“It is not the who that interests me yet. It is the how.” Jones leaned back in his chair. “Your floor was supposed to be unbreakable. No forced doors. No tripped alarms. Nothing left behind but one dead man and a great deal of nothing. That is not a burglar, Mr. Valerius. That is a professional, trained by professionals. In thirty years I have known exactly one person who could move through a locked building the way this woman moved through yours, clean enough that you would swear a ghost had done it.” He paused. “His name was Derek. Elite officer. Put away men who were meant to be untouchable, then walked out of his own life one morning and never came back. Most people think he is long dead.”

The name landed somewhere in Dawson, though he kept his face at polite boredom. Derek. He had heard it once, years ago, spoken the way men speak of a storm that has already blown through. A cop who couldn’t be bought, in a city built entirely on the buying of people. The sort of man who made other men vanish, and then did everyone the courtesy of vanishing himself.

“And is he?”

“No body was ever found.” Jones spread his hands. “But a dead man didn’t do this. So either I am chasing a ghost, or I am chasing someone he trained, or someone born to it. A student. A son. A daughter.” He shrugged, almost gently. “Or it is none of that, and I am only a tired old man finding shapes in the rain. The honest truth, Mr. Valerius, is that we don’t yet know who she is. I had hoped, when you saw the footage, that maybe you might.”

“I don’t,” Dawson said flatly, and stood up. “If that is all, Detective, I have a company to run.”

A woman.

The word followed Dawson home and wouldn’t let him be. It paced the apartment with him as he poured a drink, circling, thinking, asking the one question he kept refusing to answer.

His mind went, once, to Aurelia. But he shut it down before the thought could draw breath.

Aurelia. The idea was almost funny. He had lived with the woman for two years. He had watched her flinch at a raised voice and weep at an unkind word and fold herself smaller every time he turned cold. There was not one clever bone in her soft little body. She had never so much as picked a lock in her life. Whatever sharp thing had walked through his building, it wasn’t the grey little mouse he had thrown away.

Just then the door opened, and Charlotte came in on a cloud of lilies, one manicured hand resting on the

gentle swell of her belly.

“You have that face,” she said, in the sweet voice she used when she wanted something from him. “The one you wear right before you ask me for a favour.”

Tneed eyes on someone.” He turned the glass slowly in his hand. “Aurelia. I want to know where she is, who

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