Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 76

Chapter 76

Chapter 76

Aurelia’s POV

We came apart so quickly I nearly fell off his lap.

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Rieck’s hands steadied me without thinking, even as the rest of him turned to cold stone, and I scrambled up to my feet, my face hot, my heart slamming against my ribs.

Hebvron didn’t move from the edge of the room. He just watched us put ourselves back together, the way at man watches something he already owns.

“We weren’t expecting you,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. Small mercy.

“No.” Hebyron’s mouth curved, not quite into a smile. “Why would you expect me, when my son has clearly not been picking up his father’s calls.”

Rieck stood up then. Whatever had been warm in him a moment ago was gone now, packed away behind the cold face I knew far better than the other one. “Father.”

“Rieck.” Hebvron leaned on the silver-tipped cane, and his pale eyes, so like his son’s and so much colder, moved over me once more, head to foot, weighing. “You have been hard to reach. A busy man, I see. Busy at home.”

He said the last word the way another man might say a curse.

“A game is won in the quiet moves, Rieck,” he went on, soft and smooth, as though he were teaching a slow child. “Not the loud ones. While you have been here, playing house, other men have been making theirs. I would hate to see you wake up one morning and find the board has been cleared without you.”

I felt the insult in his words, but I said nothing, because nothing was the only safe thing to say in front of this man. I had learned that much.

With Hebvron, every word you gave him was a word he could use, and he never, ever forgot a single one.

“Leave us,” Hebvron said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. “I would like a moment alone with my son.”

I looked at Rieck.

He gave me the smallest nod. Go, it said. I will handle this.

So I went, and I felt his father’s eyes on my back the whole way.

I shut the bedroom door behind me and stood with my back against it for a moment, and let out a long slow breath.

Whatever was about to happen in that room, I wasn’t wanted there. The two of them, father and son, the Alpha who made the rules and the Alpha who was supposed to follow them.

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16:19 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 76

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I crossed to the bed and picked up my phone, only to give my hands something to do.

There was a message waiting.

The number wasn’t saved, but I knew it. I had known it for years. I had texted it good morning and good night for two whole years of my life, back when I still believed every word the man behind it ever told me.

Dawson.

My thumb hovered, then opened it.

‘You have what belongs to me. I am going to need it back.’

I read it again. And again. A handful of plain words, and every one of them landed cold.

He knew.

For a moment I couldn’t move, could only stand there in the quiet of the bedroom with the phone heavy in my hand and his eight little words burning on the screen.

He knew it had been me. The break-in. The drive. The thing I had carried out of his building in the dark with my face turned from every camera. He had found out somehow, and now he was telling me so, plain as day.

A cold thread went up my spine, and I pushed it down hard.

I had walked into his vault. I had stood in front of a loaded gun. I had brought him to his knees in front of his whole city. I wasn’t the girl who cried over spilled wine anymore, and I wouldn’t start shaking now over a few words on a screen.

But my hands weren’t quite steady when I set the phone face down on the bed.

There was a bitter sort of joke buried in it, and I almost laughed.

He was hunting me for a thing that no longer worked. The drive he wanted back so badly was a dead lump of broken parts in some quiet shop across the city, and I could have handed it to him this minute and it would have saved neither of us.

But he didn’t know that. To him it was still the loaded gun pointed at his head.

Which meant he wouldn’t stop. Not for anything.

I didn’t know how long they stayed in that room. But at last I heard the low rumble of the two of them, then the soft buzz of the elevator, and then nothing at all.

When I came out, Hebvron was gone, but the heavy scent of cigars and old leather still hung in the empty hallway.

I found Rieck in the living room.

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 76

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