Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 73

Chapter 73

Chapter 73

“There is something you need to see.”

គ

55

55 vouchers

The voice on the line was low and confident, and Dawson knew it at once. The man he had hired in secret weeks ago, when the drive first went missing and he couldn’t let a single soul know it was gone.

“Then say it,” Dawson said.

“Not over the phone. Come to me.” He coughed. “I found who hit your company. And I found who took your drive. It is the same hand.”

For weeks he had told the board the break-in was nothing, that nothing had been taken, that chasing a ghost was a waste of good money. He had lied to all of them, because the truth was that the drive held every dirty secret he owned, and half of theirs, and if it ever saw the light he was finished. Worse than finished.

And now a quiet man on the phone was telling him he had a face.

For the first time in days, something close to hope moved in him. If he knew who, then he knew where. If he knew where, he could get the drive back, quietly, before the board ever learned it had been gone at all. He could make all of this disappear.

“I’m coming,” Dawson said, and hung up, and reached for his jacket.

RUGTON

The place was a small dark office above a closed shop, the air thick with the smell of machines and old coffee. Screens covered one whole wall, and in front of them sat the man Dawson paid to find the things other people wanted buried.

He didn’t stand when Dawson came in. He just pointed at the largest screen.

“Sit and watch.”

Dawson sat.

The footage was black and white and grainy, marked with the date of the break-in. It showed the back hallway of his own building, the private one, the one only he and a handful of trusted people could enter. A figure moved through it, slim, hooded, the face turned away from every camera.

“Whoever this is knew where the cameras were,” the man said. “Knew the angles. Never once gave me the face. Look at the way the body moves. Slow. Trained. No wasted steps. This is not some street thief who got lucky.” He tapped a key. “So I stopped chasing the face. A clever person can hide a face all night long. What they can’t hide is how they got through your doors.”

The screen changed. A line of cold data, times and codes.

“Your private office. Your safe room. Both opened that night with a print already in the system. Not a forced lock. Not a copied key. A clean, registered print, scanned and approved, as if the owner had walked right in.” He looked at Dawson at last. “And that print belongs to a name nobody ever took out of your building’s records Someone signed off on the divorce. Nobody ever wiped her access.”

13

16:19 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 73

Dawson went very still.

:

“Show me the name,” he said, though some cold part of him already knew.

The man clicked again, and there it was, plain white letters on a black screen.

AURELIA

The room seemed to tilt.

55

55 vouchers

He stared at the name, and then at the slim hooded figure frozen on the screen above it, and he saw it now, the way she held herself, the line of her shoulders, the quiet way she had always moved through his house when she didn’t want to be seen.

Aurelia. His Aurelia. The soft, weeping girl who had signed every paper he ever pushed across a table without reading a single word of it.

She had walked into his building in the dark, opened his safe with a thumb he had forgotten to erase, and carried out the one thing in the world that could end him.

“That is not possible,” he said, but his voice didn’t sound sure, even to his own ears. “She is weak. She would faint at the sight of a locked door. She doesn’t have the spine for this.”

“It is more than possible,” the man said. “It happened. The print doesn’t lie.” He leaned back. “You wanted the hand behind your trouble. There it is. The same person who hit your stock. The same person who took your drive. A woman you used to be married to.”

He didn’t remember the drive home.

He sat in his dark sitting room with a glass of scotch he didn’t drink, and he turned it over and over in his mind, and none of it would fit the shape of the woman he remembered.

Aurelia didn’t have this in her. The Aurelia he knew cried when he raised his voice. She thanked the staff. She believed every lie he told her for two whole years and never once checked a single one. He had picked her for exactly that. Soft. Easy. Grateful. A pretty thing that gave him no trouble at all.

So when had she changed? And how in the world had he missed it?

It didn’t matter, he told himself. What mattered was the drive. She had it, or that cold new husband of hers had it, and as long as it was out there somewhere, Dawson was a dead man walking around in a good suit. He had to get it back. Whatever it took. Whoever he had to go through to do it.

Just then the front door opened, and the heavy lily perfume came in ahead of her.

“Dawson?” Charlotte crossed the room, rubbing slow circles on her belly, her face still pinched from days of bad news. “I have been thinking about the gala. About my cards.” She sat carefully on the arm of the chair across from him. “I asked around. One of the waiters remembered something.”

“What did he remember?” Dawson said, though his voice had gone flat and far away.

243

16:19 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 73

5$

55 vouchers

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify