Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 74

Chapter 74

Chapter 74

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Dawson didn’t sleep that night, and by morning the shock had settled into something colder, and far more useful.

He sat at his desk high in the tower, and he thought about his ex-wife.

Aurelia. The girl he had married, used, and thrown away.

He turned the thought over and over, and the more he looked at it, the less he could stand it.

It wasn’t only that she had taken the drive, though that alone could end him. It was the nerve of it. The insult. She had stood in his own hallway, used a thumbprint he had been careless enough to leave in the system, and helped herself to the one secret that could put him in a cell.

And she hadn’t stopped there.

She had gone to the gala. She had emptied Charlotte’s bag in a room full of cameras, left his mistress standing there with nothing in front of the whole city, and put the word bankrupt in every headline by morning. That little show had cost him far more than his pride. It had cost him Ashford. Twenty percent, gone in an afternoon, because a quiet woman in a mask had wanted to make a point.

He had built his whole life on reading people. On knowing, at one glance across a table, what a man wanted and what he feared and what he would trade to keep it. It was the one talent he truly trusted in himself. And he had read Aurelia as nothing. A soft chair. A warm coat. A thing of no weight at all.

That was the part that wouldn’t let him rest. Not the theft. The mistake. He had looked straight at her for two years and seen nothing, and the nothing had walked off with his life in her pocket.

Dawson lit a cigarette with a steady hand and watched the smoke curl up towards the ceiling, and somewhere under his ribs his wolf stirred.

She wanted a war. Fine. He had started and finished more of them than she would ever know, in rooms far colder than any she had stood in.

She had no idea what she had started.

He stood, straightened his white jacket, and went out to the wide floor where his people worked.

They went quiet when he passed, the way they always did, but quieter today. They had seen the news too. They could smell the trouble on him.

He found the head of building security in his small grey room full of screens.

“The access system,” Dawson said. “All of it. I want every code changed by the end of the day. Every door. Every floor The vault, the private hallway, my office. New codes, fresh prints, all of it.”

The man looked up, confused. “Sir? Is there a problem with the system?”

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16:19 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 74

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“There was.” Dawson’s voice didn’t change. “There is one print still in your records that should have come out a long time ago. A woman who hasn’t worked here, and hasn’t been welcome here, for many months. He leaned a hand on the desk. “Aurelia. Pull her print. Wipe it. I want no trace of her left in this building. Not in a door. Not in a log. Not anywhere.”

The man’s fingers were already moving. “Right away, sir.”

Dawson watched the name come up on the screen, the same plain letters that had tilted the floor under him the night before, and then he watched the man delete it.

“While you are at it,” Dawson added, “give me the logs. Every door she ever opened in this building, going back. I want to know how long she had been walking in and out before I noticed,”

“Yes, sir.”

It was a small thing. A line of data, gone.

It didn’t make him feel better. The drive was still out there. The damage was already done. Wiping her print now was like locking a door after the whole house had already been carried off.

But it was a start. And Dawson had learned long ago that a man who couldn’t win everything at once won one small piece at a time, until he had it all again.

“One more thing,” he said at the door. “From now on, no name goes into this system without my eyes on it first. No exceptions.”

“Understood, sir.”

He left them to it, and the cold plan in his head grew another inch.

That evening, when the tower emptied, Dawson didn’t go home.

He couldn’t stand the thought of the dark sitting room, the untouched scotch, Charlotte and her belly and her endless complaints. He needed to see something with his own eyes. He needed to see her.

So he had his driver take the car across the city, towards the part of it that belonged to the cold northern family now, towards the tall building where his ex-wife lived with her new husband.

He didn’t go to the doors. He wasn’t a fool. He had the car stop a street away, in the shadow between two lights, where he could see the people who came and went.

And then, as though the night meant to be kind to him for once, he saw Aurelia.

She came out through the wide glass doors into the cool evening, and for a moment Dawson didn’t breathe.

She looked different. That was the first thing that struck him. Not the clothes, though they were finer than anything he had ever bought her. It was the way she held herself. Straight. Easy. Sure. The bowed little head was gone. The woman who used to shrink at the edge of his parties walked down the steps as though the whole street belonged to her.

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16:19 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 74

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