Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 81

Chapter 81

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 81

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Then he was gone, and the door closed, and only my father was left, and the cigar smoke, and the old leather of that cold room.

“Who was that?” I said.

“A friend.” My father didn’t look up from his glass. “He keeps an eye on Dawson for me. Watches where the money goes. What the boy is doing.” There was a pause. “Since my own son has been far too busy at home to bother.”

I let the barb go. I hadn’t come to fight.

“I am not here about Dawson,” I said. “I am here about a name.”

Something flickered across my father’s face. He set down his glass.

“Sit down, Rieck.”

I didn’t sit. “Derek. A cop. Years ago. His name turned up beside Grandfather’s, in a place it had no business being.” I watched him. “You know who he was. I can see it on you. Tell me.”

For a long moment my father said nothing. Then he leaned back, and the smile he gave me had no warmth at all in it.

“Derek.” He said it like an old, sour memory. “Now there is a name I haven’t heard spoken aloud in many years. Where did you dig that up?”

“Tell me who he was.”

“He was a problem.” My father turned his glass slowly in his hand. “A cop. A very good one, which is the worst kind there is. The sort who can’t be bought, can’t be frightened, can’t be reasoned with. He spent his whole short life pulling down men far more powerful than himself, one after another, and he was good at it.” His eyes met mine. “And then he made the mistake of setting his sights on your grandfather. On this family. On everything we have.”

The room had gone very still.

“What happened to him?” I asked, though I think I already knew.

“Your grandfather did what had to be done.” My father said it simply, lightly, as if he were telling me the time. “A man like Derek doesn’t stop. You don’t warn him. You don’t pay him off. You don’t sit and wait for him to take everything you have built. You deal with him. Quietly. Completely. And then you keep the empire standing for another hundred years.” He shrugged. “Your grandfather took care of Derek. It was the only way. It was the right way.”

Took care of.

I knew exactly what those words meant in my father’s mouth. I had used them myself, more than once, about men who were never seen again.

My grandfather had killed him. He had murdered Derek and buried the whole thing so deep that only a half- dead drive across the city still remembered it had ever happened at all.

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 81

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Derek. The cop. The man who had left a little girl at an orphanage with a promise he could not keep.

He had never come back because my own blood had made sure that he could not.

I thought of her telling me the story in the dark, calm, dry-eyed, too used to the pain of it to weep. A door, a promise, and a man who broke it. Except he had not broken it. It had been broken for him, by a Valerius, with a Valerius hand, long before she was old enough to understand any of it.

And then, years later, another Valerius had married her. Me. By a contract my father wrote. As if it were chance.

It was not chance. Nothing in my family was ever chance.

Somewhere in the cold of it, one small thread pulled at me. My own file had said no body was ever found. No grave. Nothing. But my father spoke as though the matter were closed, certain and finished, and I did not have it in me, just then, to pull at the thread.

“I see,” was all I said. There was nothing else safe to say in that cold room, with my father watching me the way he watched everything, for the cracks.

I don’t remember the drive home.

I remember the door, and the one lamp burning, and her scent reaching me before I saw her.

She was curled on the white couch with a book, and she looked up when I came in, and she smiled at me, and the smile twisted my chest.

She didn’t know. She sat there in my home, in one of my shirts, warm and soft and trusting, and she didn’t know that the reason she had grown up alone, the reason a man had left her at a door and never come back, slept under the same roof as her every single night. Me. My name. My blood.

“You are home early.” She set the book aside. Then she looked closer, the way she always did now, far too closely. “Rieck. What is wrong? You look like someone died.”

Someone had. A long time ago. Her father, by my grandfather’s hand.

“Just work,” I said.

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