Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 78

Chapter 78

Chapter 78

Rieck’s POV

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The shutter was already up when I got there, and the young man stood waiting in the doorway with the look of someone who had not slept in a while.

“This had better be worth my night,” I said, stepping past him into the dark. “I don’t come when I am called. Not for anyone. So whatever you have, it had better be big, and it had better be real.”

“It is both,” he said quietly. “Come and see.”

I followed him in.

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He led me through a low door into a second room I hadn’t seen before.

This one was full of screens, a dozen of them, maybe more. Cables ran across the floor like roots. And there in the middle of it all sat the drive. My drive. Open now, its insides bare under a lamp.

“I told you most of it was gone,” he said, dropping into his chair. “And it is. But before the rest of it died, I pulled one file off it. Just the one. Half of that is broken too. But half of it still reads.”

He tapped a key, and a page of text came up on the largest screen, grey and broken, whole lines of it gone to nothing.

“Most of this drive was money,” he said. “Names, payments, the usual dirt a man like that keeps buried. But this one file is different. This one is old. And there is a name in it that doesn’t belong with the rest.”

He pointed.

I read it, and I went very still.

Derek.

“You know it?” he asked, watching my face the way clever men watch. “Because whoever this Derek is, he is all through the part of the file I managed to save. Do you recognize the name?”

“No,” I lied.

I had read that name only weeks ago, in a thin file of my own, the one my own man had built on a dead cop who had left a little girl at an orphanage and then walked off the edge of the world. Derek. Aurelia’s father.

But I wasn’t about to say so. Not here. Not to him.

“No.” I said again. “Should I?”

He studied me a moment longer, then let it go. He had been paid far too well to push.

14

1476 Mon, Augy &

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Mese he he dragged “Hon here in the drange part. This file is not Dawson’s. It is older than Dawson. Look * the Ames te benignt op another broken line. This Derek had dealings with your farmily. Years back. With * with the file calls Lord Valerios’

The then went fanét xtcamd the.

Send Team My grandfather Dean these many years now, the old head of the line, a name spoken in my family the way ofher fattes speak of kings and of ghosts.

Your HE WANT 1 Med. That if 14 That Are Ford Valerius. Not some other.”

I went Wystime of the form monts on the whole page that came through clean. He looked up at me. “Hard try forget a frath TIKA THAT MURN half boned”

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that is the teenitula Fia sut brack and for the first time he looked truly sorry. “I don’t know. The part that MAVĚ TA}} ON is Zone Pavened through cracked dead. I can show you that the two names sat together in this me Sie Impak Lord Valerie Fied to each other somehow But what tied them, and why, and when, all of thear then with the four of the cheie le spread his hands. I am sorry. There is no more. There will never be Anymore Whatever else was on here is pass waving

Esevend at the brokens prage at the two names siffing close together in the grey ruin of it, and something cold thered threath me that hark nothing to do with my temper

Impak My grandfather Aurelia’s blood and mine, crossing somewhere far back in the dark, long before any tempeart long before any of us had been born

Your Aid well I made myself way. Speak of this to no one. Not a word. Not ever.”

I know the rules.

Then tonight your learned them again.

The penthenise was dark when I came in, just one lamp was on.

I didn’t go to bed I sat in the dark living room, and I turned it over and over, and it wouldn’t come right.

My grandfather had been the hardest man this family ever made. He had built half of what we owned out of Mood and patience

He hadn’t done favours. He hadn’t made friends. A small city cop named Derek should have meant nothing to Athan like that. A cop named Derek shouldn’t have been in his world at all.

And yet has natne and Derek’s had sat together in a dead man’s secret file, old and tangled, for reasons no one left alive conld read

How Why would my grandfather have had anything at all to do with the father of the woman now sleeping just down the hall? The same woman my own father had handed me like a tool, as if it were luck, as if it were

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 78

nothing.

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I didn’t believe in that kind of luck. Not anymore. My father did nothing by accident. He chose this woman for me, out of all the women in the world, and called it a clean way to hurt Dawson. But my father knew things the rest of us did not. He always had. And I was starting to wonder if he had known this too, all along, and said not one word.

Just then there was a soft sound behind me. Bare feet on the floor.

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