Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 97

Chapter 97

Chapter 97

Aurelia’s POV

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I had spent most of the afternoon in the study, papers spread across the desk in rows, building something Rieck didn’t know I was building yet.

A strategy. A way back into the company he had built with his own hands, the one his father had stolen from him piece by piece under the polite word restructuring.

I had spent hours cross referencing old contracts, board bylaws, even a clause buried deep in the founding papers that Hebvron himself might have forgotten existed.

If there was a legal door back into that boardroom, I intended to find it before Rieck gave up on the idea entirely.

I was no lawyer, but I had learned enough in my years reading contracts across a dinner table with Dawson to know how to spot a loophole hiding in plain language.

It felt good, actually, to have something to build instead of something to survive. For weeks I had only reacted, to Hebvron’s schemes, to Dawson’s cruelty, to Rieck’s silences.

But this was different. This was mine, a gift I planned to hand him only once it was finished and undeniable.

I didn’t hear him enter until his shadow fell across the desk.

“What are you doing?” he asked, standing just inside the doorway, his eyes moving over the scattered papers with a quick, sharp glance that missed nothing.

I moved my hand casually over the page closest to me, the one with Hebvron’s name circled twice in red ink. “Reading.”

“Reading?” He repeated the word slowly. “You have never read anything that required this many highlighters.”

“People change.”

He studied me a moment longer, long enough that I felt my heart skip a beat under his stare, but he didn’t push it.

He just nodded once, and left the room without another word.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding and pulled the papers back into their order, tucking the folder into the bottom drawer where he never looked.

Later that evening, alone in our bedroom with the door locked, I finally let myself do the thing I had been putting off all week.

1 sat on the edge of the tub, the little plastic stick balanced on the counter beside me, and stared at the

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16:23 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 97

:

seconds tick by on my phone with my heart hammering hard enough to hurt.

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Marta’s pills sat in their small bottle by the sink, a quiet, stubborn hope I had carried for weeks now, swallowed faithfully every morning with my coffee like a small private prayer.

I thought of the doctor’s words the day he confirmed what the contraceptive had done to me, how carefully he had chosen every sentence, how the word chances had come wrapped in so many soft qualifiers that it had taken me a full minute to understand he meant nearly none.

‘But nearly is not never.’

I made myself believe that, most days. And tonight I needed to believe it more than most.

One line.

Negative.

I pressed a hand over my mouth to stifle the small broken sound that tried to escape, blinking hard against the sting building behind my eyes.

“Maybe I really am broken. Maybe the contraceptive took more from me than anyone admitted.”

I wiped my eyes and stood up, tossing the test into the small trash bin beside the sink, wanting it gone, wanting the evidence of tonight’s disappointment out of sight before Rieck came looking for me.

That was when I saw it.

Tucked beneath the test, half hidden under a crumpled tissue, was a white undershirt, the kind Rieck wore under his button downs.

Except this one wasn’t white anymore. Dark stains covered the chest and collar, dried into the fabric, unmistakably blood.

My stomach twisted at that moment.

“Has he been in a fight?”

I brought the shirt up carefully between two fingers, studying the pattern of the stains, too much blood for a small cut, too spread out for anything minor.

My mind ran through every version of an explanation, none of them good, all of them circling back to the blood on his cheek two nights ago that he had brushed off as nothing more than a nosebleed.

But a nosebleed didn’t soak an entire undershirt like this.

Whatever had happened to him, it had been far worse than he wanted me to know.

I folded the shirt back the way I found it and set it exactly where it had been, some instinct telling me not to let him know I had seen it.

Not yet. Not until I understood what it meant.

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16:23 Mon, Aug 3

Chapter 97

སྙ。6)

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I sat back down on the edge of the tub, my hands still faintly trembling, the negative test and the bloody shirt sitting together in my mind like two halves of a puzzle I didn’t want to finish.

Something was happening around me that Rieck refused to let me see, something bigger than a boardroom, something that left blood on his cheek and stains on his clothes and no honest explanation that made any real sense at all.

I thought of the wolf stories Marta had told me once, half joking, half serious, about the old families and the things they kept hidden even from their own wives.

I had laughed it off at the time. But tonight, staring at that shirt, the laugh felt very far away.

I found him in the living room later, a glass of something amber in his hand, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular.

“Where did you go the other night?” I asked, keeping my voice light, careful not to let the trash bin discovery show on my face. “You came home covered in blood and told me it was a nosebleed. That wasn’t a nosebleed, Rieck.”

He didn’t even look up from his glass. “I took care of some personal matters.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is the only one you are getting tonight.”

I sat down slowly across from him, studying the tired lines around his eyes, the way his shoulders sat too rigid even for a man just relaxing at the end of a long day. “You are hiding something. I’m not asking you to explain your entire life to me, but a blood stained shirt isn’t nothing.”

“It’s handled.”

“Everything with you is handled. Handled how? Handled by who?”

“Aurelia.” My name came out low. “Some things are safer left alone.”

“Safer for who? For me, or for you?”

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