Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 69

Chapter 69

Chapter 69

Aurelia’s POV

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The hall was a crowd of silk and painted masks, and behind my own, not one soul in that glittering room knew my name.

That was the whole point.

I had pinned a slim black mask over the top of my face and walked through the doors as just another beautiful stranger.

No one stopped me. No one looked twice. For the first time in weeks I was no one’s wife and no one’s prisoner. I was just a woman in a crowd.

Music moved through the room, strings and a piano somewhere I couldn’t see. Waiters drifted between the bodies with trays of champagne held high above their heads, Chandeliers threw gold light down over bare shoulders and jeweled throats.

It was beautiful. It was exactly the sort of room Charlotte loved best, the kind built for being seen in.

I raised a glass I didn’t mean to drink and let my eyes start their quiet work.

A man found me before I found her. Tall, well dressed, a wolf mask of pale silver pushed up into dark hair. He bowed a little, the way men do when they believe charm is a thing you can perform on command.

“Dance with me,” he said. “You are far too lovely to be standing here on your own.”

On any other night I would have said no. But tonight a man on my arm was the finest mask of all. And a woman dancing was a woman no one studied too closely.

“One dance,” I said, and gave him my hand.

He led me out on the floor, and over his shoulder, behind the cover of his arm, I searched the room.

He said something pleasing about the music, about the wine, about how a woman like me should never want for a partner.

I gave him the small laugh he was fishing for and let him believe I was listening.

It cost me nothing. A smiling woman in a man’s arms was the most invisible thing in any room.

I found her by scent before I saw her, that sweet heavy perfume she had always worn far too much of.

My head immediately turned towards the scent. And there, across the hall, near the front, where the important people always gathered was Charlotte.

She glowed under the lights in pale gold, her mask pushed up into her hair so the cameras could still find her face, one hand resting on the round swell of her belly. And beside her, white jacket, a glass of scotch held loose in his fingers, stood Dawson.

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Chapter 69

The two of them, side by side, like the king and queen of the whole pretty room.

“Enjoy it,” I thought. “Enjoy every last second of it.”

As the song ended, I drew my hand free of my partner’s.

“Thank you,” I told him. “I have seen a friend.”

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Just then a voice rose over the music, and the lights swung toward a raised platform at the head of the hall.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the presenter called. “If I might have you. Our auction is about to begin.”

A ripple of pleasure ran through the crowd. This was the heart of the night, the reason half of them had come at all.

Trays of dark velvet appeared on the platform, and on the velvet, jewels. Diamonds, a whole river of them. Emeralds the size of grapes.

“All payment is made immediately, as always,” the presenter said, smiling. “We are a charity in a hurry.”

My heart skipped a beat beneath the calm I wore like a second mask. This was the part I had come for.

I let myself drift back from the crowd, away from the platform, towards the long tables near the front where the honoured guests had set down their things to press forward and see the jewels.

Toward Charlotte’s chair. Toward Charlotte’s bag.

She had left it behind, of course she had.

A small gold thing, beaded, resting on the back of her seat while she stood near the platform and struggled to see the diamonds. Everyone was looking forward. Everyone was looking at the velvet.

No one was looking at me.

I came up beside the chair as though I belonged there, as though I were only passing through, and I let my hand fall to the little gold bag.

The clasp opened without a sound.

Inside, among the lipstick and the folded tissue and the small useless things women carry, I found what I wanted. A slim card holder. I slid it free and opened it, below the line of the table.

Bank cards. Three of them, heavy and black and proud.

I took them all.

Then I saw the phones. Two of them, tucked together along the side of the bag. One I knew was hers. The other was larger, plainer, and it was buzzing even now, call after call. I knew whose it was before I ever touched it

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Chancen 68

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Dawson had let his phone in Charlone’s bag. To bade from someone. I thought. To duck the calls he didn’t

want to take

I didn’t spare thema

There was a tall silver backet at the end of the table, deep with ice and cold melt water, two bottles leaning in it I lined both phones out of the bag and I let them ship from my fingers down into the water, deep, under the ice where they sank and went dark and stayed

Then I closed the gold clasp, set the bag back exactly where it had stood, and walked away

I didn’t run. Running was how women like me got caught. I walked slowly, a guest stepping out for a breath of air, and I didn’t let the breath go out of me until I had shipped through a side door into a quiet carpeted hall where the music came far through the walks

There alone. I took out the three black cards

I beat the first until it cracked, then folded it back the other way until it broke clean in two. The second. The third. I worked them down small snapping the pieces between my fingers, until what had been Charlotte’s bottomless money was nothing but a handful of sharp plastic shards in my palm.

Then I dropped them into a tall planter against the wall and pushed them down under the soil with two fingers, where no hand would find them.

I stood a moment in the quiet and breathed, and let myself feel the hard satisfaction of a thing done well, and done quietly and done by me.

The old Aurelia would have wept in a hall like this one, or begged, or run. The woman in the dark gown only smoothed her skirt and checked the soil under her nails.

Then I fixed my mask, and I went back in.

I wouldn’t have missed what came next for anything in the world.

The hall had grown louder as the bidding was already under way on the smaller pieces.

I found myself a place at the edge of the crowd where I could see the platform and the front row both, and I waited.

It didn’t take long.

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