Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 84

Chapter 84

Chapter 84

Aurelia’s POV

The blindfold came off, and the light was so bright it hurt.

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I blinked against it, my eyes watering, my head pounding from whatever they had used to put me under. The room tilted, then settled, then sharpened into something cold and grey and wrong.

A warehouse. High metal ceiling. Bare concrete. Dust hanging in a single hard shaft of light from somewhere far above. The smell of rust and damp and old oil, thick in my throat.

I was tied to a chair.

Steel, cold against my back and my arms, bolted down to the floor. My wrists were bound to the armrests, my ankles to the legs, and when I pulled, nothing gave. Nothing at all.

The last thing I remembered was the penthouse. The kitchen. Reaching for a glass of water. A sound behind me, an arm, a cloth pressed over my face, and then a sweet heavy darkness.

Now this.

Think. I made myself breathe. Fear was a door that opened onto worse rooms. I had learned that long ago, in another life, with another man. I breathed, and I looked, and I made myself count up what I had.

A chair. Ropes. An empty warehouse. No windows that I could see. No way to know where in the city I was, or whether I was even in the city at all.

And no one knew I was here. Rieck would be looking. Rieck would tear the whole world apart looking. But Rieck didn’t know where to look, and neither did I.

I was on my own.

I had been on my own before. Most of my life, in fact. There was no man coming to a door to save me. There never had been. The one who had promised it had walked away when I was five and never come back.

So I set my jaw and I waited, because waiting was the only move I had, and because whoever had gone to all this trouble to take me had not done it to leave me sitting alone in the dark for long.

He came out of the shadows so quietly I didn’t hear him until he was almost on me.

A big man, broad through the shoulders, in dark plain clothes, his face hidden behind a smooth black mask that showed nothing but his eyes.

He pulled a second chair around in front of me and sat, easy, patient, the way a man sits when he has all the time in the world and knows that you don’t.

“Aurelia Valerius,” he said. His voice was low and rough and deliberately flat, the voice of a man hiding even

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16:21 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 84

that. “You and I are going to have a conversation. And the easier you make it, the sooner it ends.”

“What do you want?” My voice came out steadier than I felt. A small victory.

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“You know what I want.” He tilted his head. “Don’t waste my time pretending you don’t. The drive. The one you took. You are going to tell me where it is.”

The drive.

Everything went cold and very clear.

This was about the drive. After all of it, the gala, the cards, the war I thought I had been fighting, this was about that broken piece of nothing sitting in a shop across the city. They had taken me out of my own home, drugged me, tied me to a chair in this rotten place, for that.

“I don’t have it,” I said.

“Wrong answer.”

“It is the truth. I don’t have the drive. I haven’t had it in…”

The first shock took the rest of the words out of my mouth.

I won’t describe it. There are no good words for it. It came from nowhere, white and total, and my whole body went rigid against the ropes, and from somewhere very far away I heard a sound that must have been me. Then it stopped, and I sagged in the chair, shaking, my breath sobbing in and out of me.

“Where is the drive?” he asked. He hadn’t raised his voice at all.

“I told you…”

The second one came.

When it ended I was crying, and I hated that. I hated the tears more than the pain, because tears were what they wanted, and I had sworn years ago that I was done handing men my tears.

“This is easy to stop,” the man said softly. “One sentence. Where is the drive.”

I raised my head. I looked at the eyes in the mask. And I gave him nothing.

He sighed, almost sorry, and reached for me again, and the white took me under, and then there was nothing at all.

I don’t know how long I was gone. When I came back, the light was the same, the warehouse was the same, and the masked man sat in the same chair, staring at me with those flat, patient eyes.

“There she is.” he said.

And it started again.

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16:21 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 84

:

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I lost count of how many times. I lost track of the questions. Where is the drive. Who has it. Did you give it to Rieck. Did you give it to Kaelen. Over and over, the same flat voice, the same white fire, the same dark afterward.

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