Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 88

Chapter 88

Chapter 88

Rieck’s POV

I let my phone ring twice more before I picked it up.

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“Meet me now,” Hebvron said. No greeting. He never gave one.

“Where?”

“The house. I already told the cook to set two plates.” Then the line went dead.

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I looked back towards the bedroom door. Aurelia was asleep, or close to it. I had checked on her twice already tonight, more than I would admit to anyone.

I told the guard outside to double his watch, and I left.

My father’s dining room never changed. Dark wood, tall candles, the smell of cigar smoke worked so deep into the walls that it never left.

He sat at the head of the table, cane resting against his chair, a glass of red wine in front of him that he had not touched.

“Sit.” he said. “Eat something. You look like a man who hasn’t slept.”

“I haven’t.”

“That is what I want to talk about.” He waved off the servant standing near the door until we were alone. Then he leaned forward, both hands folded on the table. “Your wife’s kidnapping. I have been thinking about it

since I heard.”

“It is handled.”

“Is it.” He said it like a statement, not a question. “Whoever took her believed she had something. The contents of that drive. They wanted to know what she knew.”

“She knew nothing. The drive is dead. Dawson already thinks so too.”

“Exactly.” A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the kind that never reached his eyes. “Dawson believes the drive is worthless. But what if he believed the opposite? What if he believed his own wife, his ex- wife now yours, walked away from that vault with every secret he has buried for ten years?”

I set down my fork. “Say what you mean.”

“I mean we let him keep thinking it. We let him believe Aurelia read that drive before it broke. Every name in it. Every payment. Every board member he bought and every deal he built on lies.” He took a slow sip of his wine now, watching me over the rim of the glass. “A man like Dawson can’t move against a threat he doesn’t understand. He was already planning to hand the company to his unborn son, to lock everything down clean

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Chapter 88

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before anyone could touch it. If he believes Aurelia holds the truth, he will freeze. He will spend his time protecting himself instead of building his empire.”

“You want to use her as bait?”

“I want to use her as a weapon. There is a difference.”

“Not to her there isn’t.”

Hebvron’s eyes didn’t move from mine. “It is simple. She calls Dawson. She lets him believe she knows everything. I already know she broke into his building herself, the guards, the vault, all of it. She is not new to danger, Rieck. She has proven that twice now.”

I felt the anger rise slow and hot under my skin, the same anger that always came when I thought of her tied to that chair, of the marks that were only starting to fade from her wrists. “She has already been hurt because of that drive. Twice. You want to send her back into the same fire and call it strategy.”

“I call it using what we have.”

“She is not a tool.”

“She signed a contract, did she not? To help destroy Dawson. This is destroying Dawson.” He set his glass down with a soft click against the wood. “The marriage was never about love, Rieck. It was built to end him. You know this. I know this. Don’t pretend the last few weeks have changed the purpose of the thing.”

I didn’t answer right away. My jaw was tight, and under the table my hand had curled into a fist without me telling it to.

Hebvron stared at me with the patience of a man who already knew the answer he wanted. Then something changed in his face, some quiet understanding settling behind his eyes. “Don’t tell me you are in love?”

The room went still. Even the candle flames seemed to hold their breath.

“Would it be wrong to say I am?”

For a long moment my father said nothing. He looked at me the way he used to look at a bad investment, weighing it, turning it over, deciding what it cost him.

“Not at all,” he said finally. “But I would be disappointed in my son.”

I drove home with the windows down, letting the cold air bite at my face, hoping it would clear my head.

But it didn’t. My father’s words stayed with me the whole way, sitting heavy in my chest like something swallowed wrong.

To him, Aurelia was never a person. She was a piece on a board, useful only for what she could take from Dawson. He had looked at his own son loving someone and called it a disappointment, as if love itself was the flaw and not the years of cruelty that came before it.

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Chapter 88

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