Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 83

Chapter 83

Chapter 83

Rieck’s POV

“What?”

The word came out of me flat and quiet, and the man on the line didn’t make me say it twice.

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“She is gone, boss. Mrs. Valerius. She was in the penthouse, and now she is not. We think someone took her.”

I don’t remember crossing the room. I don’t remember the faces of the men I left sitting at that table with nine figures on the line between us.

I remember the lift, and her name going round and round in my head.

By the time the doors opened on the lobby I had the phone crushed against my ear.

“Say it again,” I said. “Slowly. All of it.”

“She went up to the penthouse a little after one. The detail had her the whole morning. The shops, lunch, home. Normal. Quiet.” His voice was tight. “Then there was a window. Just a few minutes. And when we checked the penthouse, she wasn’t in it. The private lift had been used. Her phone is sitting on the kitchen counter. Boss, I am sorry. The details are not clear yet. We are still piecing it together.”

Someone had walked into my home, the top floor of the tallest building in this city, past my doors, my codes, my men, and carried my wife out of it. And the details were not clear.

Do you understand what it takes to do that to a man like me? It was an insult past anything I had words for. A hand reaching through everything I was, into the one room that was only mine, closing around the one thing I could not lose.

And under the insult, under the cold, was a thing I had not felt since I was a boy. Fear. Plain and raw. Not for myself. I had never once feared for myself. For her.

This morning she had pushed the hair off my forehead and told me the world could wait an hour. And I had left her there. I had gone to my meetings and my numbers and left her alone in a glass box on the top of the world, and someone had just reached up and taken her out of it.

“I am coming home,” I said. “Touch nothing.”

The penthouse was full of the wrong people.

My own men, yes, moving room to room with the quiet I paid them for. But near the lift, in my own hallway, stood two strangers with a camera and a recorder, and a third already talking low into a phone.

Journalists. Somebody had talked, and the smell of a Valerius story had drawn them up out of the gutter before I had even reached my own door.

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 83

“Get them out,” I said, and I didn’t slow down, and my men moved.

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The penthouse went quiet around me as I walked into it. And there, under everything, was her scent. Vanilla and rain on cedar, everywhere, as though she had only just stepped out of the room. As though she would walk back in any second.

But she wouldn’t walk back in any second.

I stood in the middle of it and breathed, and I reached for the other thing, the wrongness, the thread of whoever had been in my home. And there was almost nothing. A trace. Cold, hidden, gone the moment I reached for it. Whoever had done this had known what I was. Had known to mask their scent from a man who could follow it.

That told me more than anything my men had said. This was not some snatch off a street corner. This was planned. This was clean. This was someone who knew exactly whose wife they were taking, and exactly what that husband could do.

Which left me a very short list. Dawson, desperate, cornered, certain she still held the drive that could ruin him. Kaelen, who had taken her once before and promised, smiling, that we would meet again. Or my own father, who moved every piece on every board and called it fate. Three men. Any one of them. None of them anyone I could just walk up to and break.

The guard who had been on the door stood waiting for me by the window, grey in the face, and I crossed to him slowly.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Boss.” He could barely look at me. “I was at the door the whole shift. The whole shift. I stepped away for two minutes, no more, I had to use the bathroom, and when I came back the lift had moved and she was. She was just gone. Two minutes. I swear it to you. Two minutes.”

The wolf in me didn’t ask my permission.

I had his throat in my hand before I had decided to move, his back against the cold glass, his feet not quite under him, and the sound that climbed up out of my chest wasn’t a sound a man makes.

“Two minutes,” I said, very softly. “You gave them two minutes.”

He couldn’t answer. My hand was too tight around his throat for that.

I made myself ease it. Not for him. A dead guard could tell me nothing, and I needed every scrap each of them had.

“Hear me,” I said, close to his grey face. “You are going to help me find her. You are going to remember every second of your shift. Every face. Every sound. And then you are going to pray, harder than you have ever prayed for anything in your life, that I find her, and that she is whole when I do.” I let him feel the rest of it in my eyes. “Because if she is not, losing this job will be the very least of what happens to you. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he choked. “Yes, boss.”

I let him go. He slid down the glass and stayed there on the floor, and I was already turning away, already

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16:20 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 83

moving, because every second I spent on him was a second I wasn’t spending on her.

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I tore the city apart

Tobias, and every man I had. Every road out. Every camera. Every favour I was owed, and a hundred I wasn’t.

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