Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 68

Chapter 68

Chapter 68

Rieck’s POV

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My phone rang again in the dark of the study, and the name on the screen was the same one it had been all night. Dad.

I watched it ring until it stopped, and then I turned it face down on the desk and waited for it to start over. And it always started over.

The tech had called me hours before and told me almost nothing. He had put the drive on a reader, found one corner of it still breathing, and said he wouldn’t know what that corner held until morning. “Give me the night,” he had said. “I’ll call you the moment I am sure.”

So I had nothing yet, and a father who wouldn’t stop ringing to ask me for the one thing I couldn’t give him.

I let the phone buzz on the wood a second time and didn’t bother to check.

I knew by now what the calls were. They were not worry. My father had never once in his life rung to ask whether Aurelia was sleeping, or eating, or healing from the hole a bullet had left an inch from her heart. He called about the drive. He called about Dawson. He called about the long quest he had been running since the night he found a crying woman in the rain and handed her a pen.

She had been a tool to him from the first line of that contract. A way to put an heir into the family and a knife into Dawson with the same hand. That was all she had ever been meant to be, to any of us.

Including me.

That was the part I kept turning over in the dark. I wasn’t supposed to care where she was tonight. I wasn’t supposed to notice the empty room, or listen for the door, or feel the quiet of the penthouse settle against my ribs like a held breath. The contract didn’t ask it of me. My father had never wanted it of me.

And yet here I sat, listening.

Somewhere across these last months a thing had changed in me. I couldn’t name the day it happened. I only knew that it had, and that I didn’t understand it, and that I trusted it about as far as I trusted my father’s patience.

She found me there a little later, and I felt her before I saw her, the way I always did now.

When she stepped in, she was dressed.

Not for the white couch and a book. Dressed. A dark gown that moved when she moved, her hair loose down her back, something small at her ears that sparkled in the low light. She looked, for a woman who had spent weeks behind locked doors, like a woman with somewhere to be.

I stayed in the chair and let my gaze travel over her slowly.

Going somewhere?” I asked.

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16:16 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 68

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“To see a friend.” She reached up and steadied one earring. “Someone I met recently. I won’t be long.”

A friend? She had no friends in this city I hadn’t first looked into, and the ones I had looked into she didn’t care about.

“Which friend?”

“You wouldn’t know her.” A small smile, easy, well made. “I promise I’ll be home before you have the time to

miss me.”

My wolf didn’t care for any of it. Not the gown, not the open door, not the cold breath of night air she meant to walk out into. It turned over beneath my calm and wanted me on my feet and across the room. But I kept my seat. A man who tied his wife to a chair wasn’t a man at all. He was my father.

“Be careful,” I said instead.

Just then the phone on the desk rang. It was Dad.

Aurelia’s eyes went to it, then came back to me. “You are not going to answer that?”

“No.”

“It has been ringing the whole evening, Rieck.”

“It is not important.” I held her gaze and let nothing of the truth into mine. “Go and see your friend.”

She looked at me a moment longer than the words needed, as though she were weighing something behind her own quiet face.

Then she crossed the room, and as she passed she drew her fingers along the line of my jaw, that one small habit of hers that took me apart every time she used it, and then she was gone.

I gave her five minutes to clear the building. Then I raised the phone, and the call I made wasn’t to my father.

The man behind the steel shutter answered on the second ring, wary already. “Mr. Valerius. I told you, the drive will not be ready until…

“Not the drive.” I leaned back into the chair. “A number. I want it tracked, live, fed to this phone. You could do that in your sleep.”

There was a pause. “That is not really what you…”

“Double your fee for the night. You understand the arrangement by now.”

I heard him let his breath go, and then the quick small clatter of his keys. “Give me the number.”

I read it out of memory. I had seen it a hundred times, on her screen, on the contract, on the forms my father loved so well.

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16:16 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 68

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