Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 82

Chapter 82

Chapter 82

Rieck’s POV

I smelled the food before I was halfway down the hallway, and I stopped dead.

នគ

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No one cooked in my house in the morning. The staff didn’t come until later. I had eaten breakfast alone, or not at all, for as long as I had lived in that tower.

But there it was. Eggs. Warm bread. Coffee, real coffee, the smell of it filling the whole kitchen. And there she was, in one of my shirts, her hair loose, setting two plates down on the table as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

“You are up early,” I said.

“So are you. Sit.” She nodded at the chair across from her. “Eat.”

I stood in the doorway a moment longer than I meant to, just looking at her. At the small ordinary scene of it. A woman in my kitchen, in my shirt, making me breakfast as though we were any two people who belonged to each other. I had lived my whole life in rooms built of glass and steel and cold, and none of them had ever once looked like this.

“I’m going to be late.”

“You are the boss. You can’t be late to your own building.” She poured the coffee without looking up. “Sit down, Rieck. You didn’t eat last night either. I am not going to keep watching you run yourself into the ground on an empty stomach.”

I had a meeting at nine I didn’t intend to miss. I had a hundred things waiting for me in the cold high rooms across the city.

But I sat down. The cold Alpha of the north, who didn’t take orders from anyone living, sat down because his wife told him to, and couldn’t for the life of him say why he wanted to.

She slid a plate in front of me and took her own seat, and there was a small pleased curve to her mouth that she was trying to hide, and I let her hide it.

We ate. She talked, the way she did now, easy and warm, about nothing that mattered, and I listened, the way I did now, saying little, taking it all in. Her bare foot found mine under the table and stayed there, warm, a small quiet claim of her own.

It should have felt like a trap. Everything in my life was a trap of one kind or another, a deal with a hook in it, a kindness with a price. This did not. She wanted nothing from me. She was just glad I was there, eating her eggs, late for my own tower. This felt like the only thing in the whole world that was not trying to take something from me.

And the guilt sat under it the entire time, quiet and cold, because I knew what I knew, and she didn’t, and every soft morning like this one was built on a thing I would never tell her.

“You are quiet this morning,” she said. “Quieter than usual, and you are not a loud man to begin with.”

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 82

“I am eating”

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You are brooding. You brood with your whole face. She reached across and pushed a strand of hair off my forehead, easy, like she had done it a hundred times like she had every right to. Whatever it is, it can wait one hour. The world will still be there to be ruled at nine.

I caught her wrist before she pulled it back. Held it a moment. Pressed my mouth to the inside of it, once. I watched her breath catch. I had learned, slowly, that I didn’t need words for this. My hands had always been better at the truth than my mouth.

“Thank you.” I said when the plate was clean. I did not say it often. I meant it.

She looked surprised, then pleased, the colour rising in her face, and then she leaned across the table and kissed me once, soft and unhurried, and went back to her coffee as if it were nothing at all.

I went to work later than I had been late in years. I didn’t regret a minute of it.

The meeting at nine went the way meetings went. I sat at the head of the table and said the right things and didn’t hear half of them, because my mind was three days back, in a cold study, listening to my father tell me what my grandfather had done.

When the room cleared, my own man came in. The one who found things. The one who had built the file on Derek in the first place.

He shut the door behind him.

“You wanted me to look again,” he said.

“I did.” I didn’t look up from the window. “Derek. The cop. And my grandfather. Lord Valerius. I want to know what tied them together. I want records. Papers. Anything.”

“That is the thing. He set a thin folder on my desk, thinner than I wanted it to be. “There is nothing. I went everywhere. Old company books. Court files. Property records. The family archives, the parts of them I can reach. If Derek and your grandfather ever crossed paths in their lives, there is no paper left anywhere that says so. Not one line. He paused. “And that, on its own, tells you something. A cop leaves a trail. A man your grandfather dealt with leaves a trail. This one leaves nothing. It is as though someone went through, years ago, very carefully, and burned every thread that tied the two names together.”

“Someone did.” I said.

He didn’t ask who. He was paid not to.

I turned that over. Someone had cleaned this years ago, with care, with power. Only one kind of man had the reach to scrub a thing that deep. The kind of man who sat behind high grey walls with a cigar and a cane and a smile that gave nothing away.

My father had told me the truth about Derek, or some of it. But he had also, somewhere along the way, made very sure no one else could ever find it.

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 82

“Keep looking. I told him. There is always one thread they miss. There is always one. Find it.”

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He nodded and left, and I stood at the glass and thought about a family that could erase a man so completely that only a dying drive in a criminal’s safe still remembered he had ever lived.

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