Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 75

Chapter 75

Chapter 75

Aurelia’s POV

Rieck was gone before the sun was properly up, the way he had been all week.

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I woke up to a cold pillow. No note. There never was one. Just the quiet, and Marta humming somewhere down the hallway.

I made coffee. I read for a while. And then, because I couldn’t sit still in my own skin, I opened the laptop on the side table to look at the news, to see what fresh thing the city was saying about Dawson today.

It was Rieck’s laptop. He must have left it behind. And it wasn’t on the news.

It was open to a message.

I should have closed it. An obedient wife, the one I used to be, would have closed it and looked away. But I wasn’t her anymore, and the message had one word in it that caught my attention.

Drive.

It came from a number with no name saved. The drive was badly damaged, it said. The casing had cracked and the inside was worse. He had pulled off what little he could, but most of it was gone, broken past saving. He was sorry. There was nothing more he could do.

I sat back slowly.

The drive I had suffered for. The one I had walked into Dawson’s building to steal, the one a gun had been pointed at me for, the one that had cost a man his life and cost me three lost days in Kaelen’s house. That drive. The thing that was supposed to hold every dirty secret Dawson owned. The thing that was supposed to finish him for good.

Broken. Useless. Most of it gone.

And then the rest of it fell into place, quiet and cold.

The night he had come home and shattered a glass against the floor and told me it was a soured deal. The way he had gone hard and far away for days after. The way he had looked at me across the table with something heavy behind his eyes and said nothing at all.

It had never been a deal.

It had been this.

Closing the laptop, I pressed my hands flat to the cool top of it and I didn’t know what I felt.

Anger, a little. But under it was something worse.

He had been keeping it from me to protect me. From the weight of knowing my sacrifice had been for nothing

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Chapter 75

The fool. The proud, impossible fool.

And the strangest part, the part I sat with longest, was that he hadn’t used it against me.

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He had every reason to. He could have thrown the ruined drive in my face, told me my whole brave night had bought him nothing, made me feel as small as I had ever felt.

But he hadn’t.

GEROOOOOOOOOOD

I didn’t tell him I knew. Not yet.

Instead, I cooked.

It was a small thing, and a strange one for me. We had staff for this, and I had never once been any good in a kitchen. But I sent Marta home early, and I stood at the stove for two hours getting it wrong and then getting it right, because I didn’t have the words for what I wanted to say to him, and food was the only language I had left.

He came home late, the cold of the night still on his coat, and he stopped dead in the doorway of the dining

room.

The table was set. Candles. Two plates. The food I had fought all evening to make.

He looked at it for a long moment, then at me, and something moved across his face that he didn’t let me

name.

“You cooked,” he said.

“Don’t sound so shocked. I’m full of surprises.” I pulled out a chair. “Sit. Eat. It took me three tries and I won’t have it go cold.”

He didn’t move immediately. He stood there, this huge cold man who frightened whole rooms full of powerful people, and looked at a plate of food as if he didn’t quite know what to do with being cared for.

Then he crossed the room.

“Sit,” he said quietly, and pulled out my chair before he took his own.

We ate. We talked a little, about nothing. The food was good. He told me so twice, in that flat way of his I had learned meant he meant it.

And for a little while the penthouse felt less like a fortress and more like a home.

Then his phone rang.

It lay face up on the table between us, and the screen came on, and I saw the word before he covered it with his hand.

Dad

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Chapter 75

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He didn’t pick up. He turned the phone over and went back to his food as though it hadn’t happened.

“You aren’t going to answer that?” I asked.

“Later.”

“It’s your father.”

“I know who it is.” His voice had cooled by a single degree. “I will deal with him later.”

I looked at him then, really looked. The set of his jaw. The way his shoulders had gone tight at one word on a screen. This was a man who answered to no one, who took every call because every call was business and business was his blood.

And he was dodging his own father.

It wasn’t like him. Rieck didn’t flinch from anyone. I had seen him stare down men who could have ended him with a phone call and not so much as blink. But that one word on the screen had pulled his shoulders. tight and put a cold edge back into a voice that had been warm a moment before.

Whatever had gone wrong between them was new, and it was big, and some quiet part of me wondered if my name was somewhere inside it.

The next day was a Saturday, and for once neither of us had anywhere to be.

It was a rare thing, an empty day, and we didn’t quite know what to do with it.

We drifted around the penthouse in the morning light. He read. I teased him about reading. He caught my wrist when I passed his chair.

And then I was in his lap, and he was looking up at me with those pale eyes gone warm at the edges, and neither of us was pretending anymore.

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