Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 66

Chapter 66

Chapter 66

Aurelia’s POV

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It took three phone calls and a promise to behave myself before Rieck would let me out of the penthouse to buy groceries.

“Straight there and straight back,” he had said, in the flat voice that left no room to argue with it. “No detours. No trouble. You stay where Ronan can see you. And you behave, Aurelia.”

“I am buying bread,” I had told him. “Not starting a war.”

He hadn’t laughed. But he had let me go, and that small freedom felt huge after weeks of locked doors and other people’s mountains.

Wandering the bright aisles with a basket on my arm, I let myself feel, for a few quiet minutes, like an ordinary woman with an ordinary life.

I picked things up just to feel the weight of them in my hand. Bread. A bag of oranges. The honey Marta liked stirred into her tea. Small ordinary choices, every one of them mine to make.

It didn’t last though. It never did.

I smelled her before I saw her. Lilies, sweet and heavy.

“Well,” Charlotte said. “Look what the cat dragged back into the city.”

She stood at the end of the aisle in a coat that cost more than a year of someone’s rent, one hand resting on the round swell of her belly, the other holding a basket with a single bottle of sparkling water in it, as though she had come here to be seen and not to shop.

I wondered, for half a breath, what she was doing in this store, in this part of the city, so far from her own. Then I decided I didn’t give a fuck.

“Charlotte.” I kept my voice even and reached past her for the bread. “Excuse me.”

“You look tired, Ri.” She didn’t move. Her eyes went over me slowly. “Thin. Worn down. Married life with the cold one not treating you well? I heard he keeps you locked up like a little bird that bites.” She smiled. “Though I suppose a woman like you ought to be grateful that anyone keeps her at all. Twice now you have been the second choice. Dawson traded up, and your new one only took you to spite a relation.” A soft, pitying sound. “You really are just a thing men pick up to get at other men. Aren’t you, sweetie.”

I breathed in and breathed out and thought of my promise to Rieck.

I had the bread in my hand and my back half turned when she said, sweet as anything, to my shoulder blades, “Dawson hardly remembers your name these days, you know. He has me now. He has his son coming. You were a rough draft, honey. We are the finished thing.”

And something in me just ran out of patience.

I turned around.

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Chapter 66

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“Go and get a life, Charlotte.” I said it quietly. “A real one. One that is not built entirely out of a man who

cheated his way into your bed and will cheat his way right back out of it the day you stop being convenient.” I

took a step closer. “You think you are the finished thing. You are a stopgap with good hair. You are not the love of Dawson’s life. You are not even a person to him. You are an accident he has decided to be proud of in public, and the day it stops being useful, he will set you down exactly the way he set me down. You are nothing to him. You never were.”

The colour drained from her face and then came flooding back, blotched and angry, the sweetness gone.

“You little…”

“Enjoy your water,” I smiled, and walked away, and my hands were shaking the whole length of the aisle.

I knew something was wrong the moment I reached the penthouse door.

I could hear it from the hallway. A hard crash, glass on stone, then another, and the low sound of a big man moving quickly in a closed room.

My stomach twisted as I let myself in.

Rieck was standing in the middle of the living room, and the floor by the bar was covered in broken glass.

He wasn’t still. And that was the wrong thing, the frightening thing.

Rieck was always still. But now he walked the length of the windows like a thing that wanted out of its own skin, his jaw set hard, his shoulders rolled forward, his pale eyes shining with a flat cold light that had nothing human left in it.

“Rieck.” I set the bag down slowly. “What happened?”

He stopped and turned. And when he spoke his voice was almost level again.

“Nothing. A deal fell apart. Money.” He looked at the glass on the floor as though seeing it for the first time. “I lost my temper. It will be cleaned up.”

A deal fell apart?

“All right,” I said, because pushing him had never once worked, and because I had learned to fold a thing away for later rather than spend it the moment I found it. “All right. I will uhmm… I will start dinner.”

Much later, when the penthouse had gone dark and Rieck had shut himself in his study with whatever he wouldn’t say, I sat down at my computer and thought about her.

Charlotte.

She had stood there with her hand on her belly and called me a rough draft, and she had no idea, none at all, that the weak woman she remembered had spent these last months being sharpened into something with an

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Chapter 66

edge to it.

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