Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 80

Chapter 80

Chapter 80

Aurelia’s POV

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I should have let it go. I had what I wanted now, the truth at last, his wall down by an inch. But I had never been any good at leaving a loose thread alone, and there was one here, tugging at me.

“What was on it?” I asked. “The drive. If you saved even one file, even a piece of one, you must have seen something. What was it?”

He didn’t answer right away. He looked at the dark window, at the city far below, anywhere but at me.

“Family history,” he said at last. “Old papers. Names that mean nothing now. Nothing important.”

I stared at his face while he said it, and I didn’t believe a single word.

Because if it was nothing, then why was Dawson so desperate to get it back?

A man didn’t corner his ex-wife in the middle of the day, didn’t put his hands on her where the whole street could see, over a few old papers that meant nothing.

Whatever had been on that drive, it wasn’t nothing. It was everything. To Dawson, and maybe, to my husband

too.

“All right,” I said quietly. “Family history. Nothing important.”

He looked at me then, and something moved behind his eyes, almost like guilt. But he didn’t take it back.

He never did.

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going the next morning.

I went to the hospital alone, the way I had gone once before, and I sat in the same cold waiting room with my hands twisting in my lap, and I let myself hope. Just a little. Just enough to hurt.

Because everything rested on this. The contract. The year. My whole place in that tower.

The doctor came back with the result, and I knew before she opened her mouth. I had learned to read bad news off a face a long time ago.

“I am sorry,” she said gently, and sat down across from me, and gave me the rest in that soft voice they all used. The harm from the old medication was still there. Still working against me. The chances were very small. She didn’t say impossible. She was too kind for that. But I heard it underneath anyway.

Negative Again.

I thanked her and slowly walked out of that bright building into the afternoon sun and I held myself very straight and very still, all the way to the car.

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 80

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Barren. A wife who couldn’t give her husband the one thing the whole bargain had been built upon.

What happened to a contract when the thing it was written for could never come true? When the heir at the heart of it couldn’t be born?

What happened to me, when the one job I had been bought to do was a job my own body wouldn’t let me finish?

Two years married to a man who had fed me poison and called it vitamins, and this was the price of it. My broken body.

Dawson had broken me, and then left me, and then handed Charlotte everything he had stolen.

I smelled her before I saw her.

Lilies. Thick and sweet and wrong, hanging in the cool air outside the tall glass doors of the building, and my stomach dropped before my eyes had even found her.

Charlotte stood near the entrance in a pale coat, one hand resting on the round swell of her belly, glowing and golden and exactly where she had no business being. Waiting. For me.

“There she is.” Her face lit with that sweet, awful smile. “Ri. I was starting to think you would never come

home.”

“What are you doing here, Charlotte?” I didn’t slow down. “This is my home and you are not welcome at it.”

“Can a girl not pay a visit?” She came closer, her eyes moving over me the way they always did, hunting for the weak place. “You look pale, sweetie. Tired. Not sleeping well up in that big cold tower?” Her smile sharpened. “Or is it something else? I hear things, you know. I hear the new Mrs. Valerius has been to see a doctor. More than once.”

Everything in me went cold. How could she know that? I had told no one. I had gone alone, both times, quietly.

Then I understood, and the understanding was worse than the question. Dawson.

Dawson had men watching me now. He had told her.

“You have no idea what you are talking about,” I said.

“Oh, I think I do.” She tilted her head, all false pity. “You can’t give him one, can you? A baby. An heir. That is the whole reason a man like Rieck Valerius would ever marry a little nobody like you, and you can’t even manage that.” She laughed, soft and cruel. “Poor barren little Ri. Married for one single job, and your own body will not let you do it. What good is a wife who can’t be a mother? How long do you think he keeps you, once he knows?”

Every word was painful. She was good at this. She had always been so good at this. But I wasn’t the girl she used to break with a smile, and I stood there and let her finish and gave her nothing back.

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

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