Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 87

Chapter 87

Chapter 87

Rieck’s POV

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I moved my whole office into the penthouse for a week, and I didn’t tell her why.

I had Elara send the papers to me here. I took my calls at the long white table by the window, where I could see straight down the hallway to our room. I ran a company worth more than some small countries from a kitchen chair. And every twenty minutes I got up, and I walked down that hallway, and I looked in on my wife.

She was always fine. She kept telling me so.

“I am fine, Rieck.” She said it from the bed, from the couch, from the doorway of the bath, a small tired smile on her face each time. “You really don’t have to keep checking on me. I am not going to break.”

But I had seen her in that chair. I had seen the marks the ropes left on her wrists. And every time I turned back to my papers, some part of me was already counting the minutes until I could get up and make sure she was still there, still alive, still mine.

I didn’t have words for the thing that had changed in me since the warehouse. I didn’t want them. Words made a thing real, and this thing, this raw open place under my ribs, was already more than I knew how to carry. So I didn’t name it.

She thought I was only being careful. But she didn’t understand that careful was the one way I had left to say what I couldn’t say out loud.

DOCTOR OVERCO

The next day I had to go out. A site on the north edge, a building that wouldn’t run itself, and I had put it off one day too long already.

I left three men with her, and I went.

I smelled him before I saw him.

Pine. Snow. Something wild and cold that didn’t belong in my city.

I came around the half-built frame of the tower, and there he was, leaning against a stack of steel beams as though he owned them. Huge and easy, his tawny head bare to the wind, the old scar cutting down his face.

Kaelen.

My blood came up so fast I nearly lost hold of it. The air went cold around us. My eyes burned. A low sound built in my chest before I had decided a single thing.

“You have a great deal of nerve,” I said, “showing your face on my ground.”

“Pup. He grinned, all teeth. “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”

I crossed the space between us and had a fistful of his collar before my men could move, and he let me, still

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16:21 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 87

smiling, which was worse than if he had swung back.

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“You took her,” I said. Low. “Your men. Ridgeline. You reached into my home and took my wife. Now you are going to tell me where you thought that would end.”

“Easy.” He didn’t even raise his hands. His yellow eyes held mine, calm as a frozen lake. “Easy, pup. I didn’t touch your little wife.”

“Your men..”

“Men for hire go where the money is. Mine included, if the price is high enough and I happen to be looking the other way.” His voice dropped, and for one breath there was no laughter left in it at all. “I didn’t take her, Rieck. If I had wanted her, I wouldn’t have needed to pay strangers to do it. And you would never have gotten her back.”

I held his collar and I searched his face for the lie, and I couldn’t find it. That frightened me more than a yes

would have.

He saw it. Of course he saw it. And he smiled again, slow and cruel.

“Look at you,” he said softly. “The great Rieck Valerius. The most dangerous Alpha in the north, they say. And you could not keep one small woman safe inside your own tower. They walked right in and carried her out from under your nose.” He clicked his tongue. “If she were mine, that would never have happened. Something for you to think about, pup.”

The words went in exactly where he had aimed them.

I let go of his collar, because if I didn’t let go I would kill him, and I wasn’t ready. Not here. Not with her at home needing me whole and free, and not on a building site full of eyes.

“Get off my ground,” I said. “The next time I see you, one of us doesn’t walk away.”

Kaelen pushed off the beams, unhurried, and walked past me close enough that the cold wild smell of him filled my whole head.

“We will see each other soon, pup,” he whispered. “Sooner than you think. Give the little wife my regards.”

And he was gone, whistling, into the grey.

I brought the rage home with me. I couldn’t set it down.

Aurelia took one look at my face when I came through the door, and she got up off the couch.

“Rieck. What happened? What is wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“That is not nothing. Your hands are shaking. Talk to me.”

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16:21 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 87

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“I said it is nothing.” It came out harder than I meant it, and I saw it land on her, and I couldn’t call it back. I turned and walked away from her, down the hallway, into my study, and shut the door and left her standing there.

But she didn’t let it go. She never let anything go anymore.

She came to the study an hour later. She didn’t knock. She sat down across from me and she waited, quiet and stubborn, until the words came out of me in the only shape I could bear to give them.

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