Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 77

Chapter 77

Chapter 77

Rieck’s POV

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My father’s words had been sitting in my head all morning.

“Don’t forget who helped you get where you are. I gave it to you. I can take it back.”

I had heard that threat my whole life. But I had never once believed it the way I believed it now.

I sat at my desk, high up in the tower, and I didn’t work. Me. The man who always worked.

The reports sat there untouched. And the screen had gone dark from waiting on me.

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He had come into my home. Into the one room that had started to feel like more than a place I slept. And he had reminded me, soft and smiling, that I was still his boy. Then he had told me what he wanted me to do next, and just turning it over in my head made me sick.

Just then there was a knock at the door. Elara came in, sharp as ever, her tablet held against her chest.

“Your eleven o’clock, Alpha. The Hartwell people are downstairs. Should I send them up?”

“No.”

She stopped. “Sir?”

“Cancel it. Cancel all of it. The whole day.” I didn’t look at her. “Push anything that can wait. Send the rest home.”

She went still for a second. Elara had worked for me long enough to know that I didn’t cancel meetings. I didn’t have bad days. I didn’t have moods. The work never waited, not for anything.

“Of course, Alpha,” she said, and slipped out. She was far too smart to ask me why.

I got up and went to the window and put one hand flat against the cool glass and I thought about my wife.

To my father, Aurelia was a pawn. Nothing more than that. A clever one, he would give her that much. More useful than he had guessed at the start. But still just a thing to be used, and then thrown away once she had served her purpose. He had said it to my face more than once, in that smooth voice that made even the ugliest things sound reasonable.

A means to an end. That was all she had ever been meant to be.

But that wasn’t what she was. Not anymore. Not to me.

I didn’t have a word for what she had become. I had never been good with words. But I knew the feel of it.

I knew it in the way the whole penthouse felt wrong when she wasn’t in it. I knew it in the dinner she had cooked, the candles, the warm hand she laid against my face. I knew it that very morning, with my mouth on hers and the whole world locked outside the door, right up until my father walked in and reminded all of us

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Chapter 77

what we were to him.

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She was real to me now. And that, I was starting to see, was the most dangerous thing in my life. Because my father never lost. And the surest way to break a man like me was to find the one thing he couldn’t stand to lose, and close a hand around its throat.

I had to keep her far away from him. Whatever it cost me to do it.

The trouble was, I didn’t know yet what it would cost. With my father it was never the price you could see. It was the one waiting behind it.

“Care to talk about it?”

I hadn’t heard the door open. That was the first thing that struck me.

No one got near me without me knowing. No one. And yet she had crossed half my office before her scent reached me, and turned me around to face her.

Aurelia stood in the middle of my cold office, looking completely out of place and completely herself, a paper bag held in both hands.

“How did you get up here?” I said.

“Elara likes me.” A little smile. “And you didn’t eat breakfast. You never eat when your father has been at you.” She raised the bag. “So I brought you lunch. Sit down and eat it before it goes cold.”

I didn’t move for a moment. I only looked at her.

No one brought me lunch. In my whole life, not one person had ever stopped to wonder whether I had eaten.

I had men who would die the second I told them to. I had a father who had made me into a weapon. And I didn’t have a single soul who would carry a paper bag across a whole city just because I had missed a meal.

“You are staring,” she said, not looking up, laying out the small boxes one by one. “Is it the food, or me?”

“You came all the way up here to feed me?”

“I came all the way up here because you forget to be a person when you are angry.” She found a fork, held it out to me, handle first. “Somebody has to remind you.”

She set the rest of the bag on my desk and finished unpacking it, easy as anything, as if feeding the cold Alpha of the north were the most normal thing in the world.

And I stood there and felt that pull in my chest go tight again, the thing I had no name for, the thing that was going to get one or both of us killed if I didn’t watch it.

She was kind. She was gentle. She thought of other people before she thought of herself. She was nothing like the cold world that had made me, and she had walked right into the middle of it without the smallest idea of how much danger she was in.

Which was exactly why I had to keep her clear of it. Away from my father. Away from his plan. Away from all

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Chapter 77

of it. Away from me too, if it ever came to that.

“Sit, little wife,” I said, because I didn’t have any of the bigger words. “Eat with me.”

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