Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 79

Chapter 79

Chapter 79

Aurelia’s POV

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I woke up to a cold space beside me, and I knew before I opened my eyes that he was already gone.

Of course he was. He had slipped out before me every day this week, gone into the dark while I slept, leaving nothing behind but the fading smell of him on the sheets. Always that. Never him.

I lay still for a while and thought about the night before.

“Tell me about your father.”

Of all the things Rieck had ever asked me, that was the last one I would have guessed. He didn’t care about the past. He didn’t ask questions. And yet he had sat there in the dark and asked me about a man I had spent twenty years trying to forget, and when I asked him why, he had given me nothing. Just that closed face.

He was hiding something. He had been hiding it since his father walked in on us. Where he went yesterday. Why he lied about the client. All of it tangled together, and all of it kept from me.

I was tired of being kept from things.

So I got up, and I dressed, and I decided I wouldn’t spend one more day sitting in that beautiful glass box, waiting on a man who wouldn’t talk to me.

I would go out. I would walk. I would buy something silly I didn’t need and remember that I was a person, and not just a piece in everyone else’s game.

The mall was loud and full of ordinary people living ordinary lives, and for one hour I let myself be one of them.

I bought a scarf. I tried on shoes I would never wear. It was nothing, and it was everything, and by the time I stepped out the side doors into the cool afternoon I almost felt like myself again.

But that was when it went wrong.

I smelled him before I saw him. Scotch and smoke, a smell that lived in two whole years of my memory, and my body went tight a half second before a hand closed on my arm and pulled me sideways, off the busy street and into the narrow gap between two buildings.

The moment my back hit the wall, the shopping bag dropped from my hand.

And there he was, close, far too close, his handsome face twisted into something I had never let myself see clearly back when I was married to it.

“Dawson,” I breathed.

“Aurelia” He said my name like a curse. “You and I are going to have a little talk.”

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 79

“Get your hands off me.”

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“Not until you give me what is mine.” His fingers dug in. “The drive. You are going to tell me where it is, and you are going to give it back, and then maybe, just maybe, I will forget the rest of what you have done.”

My heart was slamming, but I kept my face still. I had learned that trick from him, years ago. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Don’t.” His voice dropped low. “Don’t insult me. I know it was you. The break-in. My building. My safe. Your little thumbprint was still sitting in my system, did you know that? You walked into my office in the dark and took the one thing that could ruin me, and you thought I would never find out who.”

The world went very quiet around me.

He knew. The message had told me he knew, but to hear it from his own mouth, an inch from my face, was a different thing entirely.

“And the gala.” He laughed, low and ugly. “The cards. The cameras. My name in every paper in the city. That was you as well. You haven’t been idle, have you. The weak wife who used to cry at the dinner table has been very, very busy.”

“You are hurting me.” I kept my voice even. “Let go, Dawson. I don’t have your drive.”

“Liar.”

“I’m leaving.” I twisted hard and tried to push past him.

But his hand clamped down and dragged me back against the wall, harder this time, and for one cold second I saw something really afraid underneath the anger in his eyes. And a frightened Dawson, I understood, was a far more dangerous one.

“You are not going anywhere until I have what is mine. Do you hear me? I will take it from you myself if I

have to.”

“Mrs. Valerius.”

The voice came from the mouth of the alley, calm and flat and sure.

Ronan.

He stood at the end of the narrow space with the light behind him, big and still, his eyes fixed on Dawson’s hand where it gripped my arm.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. There was a quiet in him that belonged to the men Rieck kept close, the kind of quiet that promised a great deal of noise if it was crossed.

Dawson immediately let go of me.

Is everything all right here?” Ronan asked. He wasn’t really asking me. He was telling Dawson to go.

I stepped away from the wall and picked up my fallen bag with a hand I wouldn’t let shake.

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 79

“Everything is fine,” I said. “I was just finishing up.”

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Dawson straightened his jacket. The bored mask moved back over his face, the man who owned rooms. But his eyes, when they cut back to me, were not bored at all.

“We will finish this another time,” he said softly, and walked off into the crowd.

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