Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 85

Chapter 85

Chapter 85

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Dawson took the call on the second ring, because he had been waiting on it for days.

“Tell me,” he said.

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“It is done.” The voice was flat, the voice of a man who did this kind of work and didn’t enjoy talking about it. “We were thorough. The drive is damaged. Cracked. Dead. Whatever was on it never came off, and never will. No information was accessed. By anyone.”

Dawson let out a slow breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

“You are sure,” he said. “Be very sure. My whole life is sitting on your answer.”

“Positive. The thing is a brick. It has been a brick from the start.” There was a pause. “There is one more matter. The woman. She gave us everything she had, which was the truth and nothing more. So.” Another pause. “What do you want done with the lady?”

The moment Dawson opened his mouth the line went dead.

He frowned at the phone and pulled it from his ear. The call had dropped mid-sentence. He pressed the number again.

It didn’t even ring. Unreachable.

He tried once more. Nothing. The flat cold nothing of a phone that was no longer turning on at all.

He sat with it a moment, a small itch of unease crawling across the back of his neck. The man had been about to ask him a question. A simple question, the only one left. And then, between one breath and the next, the line had just died.

Then he set the phone down. The man was smart. The man worked in dead zones and burner phones and went quiet for good reasons. A dropped call meant nothing. He would ring back within the hour. They always rang back.

And the only words that truly mattered were already his. The drive was a brick. No information had been accessed. He was safe.

After all of it, the fear and the lost sleep and Ashford pulling his money out from under him, Dawson Valerius was still standing. And the one thing in the world that could have buried him was a dead lump of plastic in a warehouse.

He almost laughed out loud, right there at his desk, alone.

That was the whole of it. For weeks he had been a man living with a knife held to his throat, the black book of every bribe and every buried body he had ever paid for sitting out there in the world in someone else’s hand. He had not been able to breathe. He had not been able to sleep. And now, at last, he could.

The woman could wait. Aurelia could sit in that chair a while longer and think hard about what her little games had cost her. He would decide what to do with her when his man rang back. There was no hurry. No one knew where she was. No one was coming for her.

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16:21 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 85

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That evening, instead of going home, Dawson had his driver take him out to the eastern edge of the city, where his future was going up out of the ground.

He walked the sites with his hands in his pockets and his collar up against the cold, and he let himself enjoy it.

Cranes. Steel. Three towers climbing where a year ago there had been nothing but his own ambition. He had come into construction late, a rich man’s hobby, everyone had said, and everyone had been wrong. He had a gift for it. He had a gift for taking what other men had built and making it his.

Some of it had been Rieck’s. That was the sweetest part. A handful of the contracts rising around him now had once belonged to the cold northern boy who thought he owned this city. Investors who had grown nervous of the Valerius name on the wrong branch of the family. Clients who liked Dawson’s easy smile better than Rieck’s silence. One by one, Dawson had taken them for himself.

He lit a cigarette and looked up at the steel against the grey evening sky, and for the first time in weeks he felt like himself again. The walls had been closing in on him. Now they were opening back up.

He was winning. He had always won, in the end. Men like Dawson did. The trick of it was simple, and he had known it his whole life. You did not love things. You did not need things. You owned them, and you used them, and when they stopped being useful you set them down and picked up something better. Aurelia had forgotten that lesson. She had let herself become useful to no one but a man who would burn for her. That was her mistake, not his.

He met Charlotte for dinner at the quiet, expensive place she liked, the one with the low lights and the staff who knew better than to stare.

She glowed across the table from him, golden and round and pleased with herself, and for once her endless talk didn’t grate on him at all. The scan had gone well, she told him. The boy was strong. Healthy. Perfect. Growing exactly the way he should.

A son. His son. An heir with his blood and his name, whole and strong, coming into a world where his father was winning again. He thought, with a thin cold pleasure, of the other woman who could not give him one. The drugged vitamins. The broken body he had left behind. Two women, and only one of them could do the single thing a woman was for, in the end. He had chosen correctly. He always did.

“He is going to have everything,” Dawson said, and he meant it. “Everything I never had. All of it.” He lifted his glass. “To my son.”

Charlotte’s eyes went soft and wet, the way they did so easily these days. She raised her water to meet his glass, and the candlelight caught the ring he had bought her, and for that one warm moment the whole ugly year seemed to fall away behind him.

And for a moment, just a moment, Dawson let himself feel like a man with a future instead of a man running from his past.

It lasted until they reached the door.

His phone rang as the valet brought the car around, and he answered it without looking, still half smiling, still

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16:21 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 85

warm with the wine and the thought of his boy.

“Dawson Valerius,” he said.

There was a silence on the line. A weird silence. The kind with a man standing inside it.

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