Marry Ex's Billionaire Uncle After Divorce (Aurora and Jasper) novel Chapter 163

Chapter 128: The Basement

(Author’s POV)

Neil looked at her through the window. His expression didn’t change. He rolled it down an inch.

“You get me the money,” he said. “She walks.”

He rolled the window back up and pulled out into the street.

Martha stood on the curb and watched the van disappear around the corner, and realized she was in the van too – she’d been so focused on the door that she hadn’t noticed him accelerating. The locks clicked again, all four of them.

She sat down on the back bench, alone, and did not let herself think about what she’d done.

Up on the fifteenth floor of Martha’s building, Leo had gone through every option in the room.

The window was the first thing he’d checked. Fifteen floors. Even if he survived the fall, he’d be in no shape to help anyone. He stepped back from it.

He went through the drawers next. The bedside table, the dresser, the shelf in the closet. No spare phone, no tablet, nothing with a SIM card. He checked under the bed and behind the headboard. Nothing.

He sat down at the desk and opened the laptop. It was old, and it took a full minute to connect to the wifi, and then he was on i********* and going through his contacts, clicking on every name that might be online on a Saturday morning.

Most of them showed as inactive. He kept going.

Ray – the guy who sat behind him in chemistry – had a green dot next to his name.

Leo sent him a message. *Are you there. I need help. It’s urgent.*

The response came back fast. Just a question mark.

Leo started typing. He got halfway through explaining – *my sister’s been taken, I’m locked in, I need

someone to call the police* – and then stopped.

The police. He thought about what that actually looked like. An anonymous tip from a teenager. A locked

apartment. A woman who’d been gone for less than an hour. They’d take notes. They’d say they’d look into it. They wouldn’t move fast enough.

He pulled open the inner compartment of the desk drawer. He’d put it there himself, after Aurora’s surgery, because she’d told him to keep it somewhere safe and he’d taken that seriously.

The business card was still there. Cream–colored, heavy stock. Black lettering.

*Phineas Everett.*

Leo held it and thought about the way that man had looked at Aurora in the hospital. Not like a business

Chapter 7 The tentent

associate. Not like someone who was simply being polite.

He knew what he was doing. And he would actually move.

Leo typed his home address into the message thread with Ray, then typed: *Call the number on this card. Tell him Aurora’s been taken. Tell him I’m locked in at this address. Do it now.*

He photographed the card and sent the image.

Ray’s reply came back in under ten seconds.

*On it.*

(Aurora’s POV)

The first thing I heard was dripping water.

It came back slowly – sound before sight, sensation before thought. Cold concrete under me. Damp cloth against my skin. My wrists pulled behind me at an angle that had already gone from painful to numb.

I forced my eyes open.

The room was dark except for a single work light bolted to the far wall. I took stock fast and quietly: basement, no windows, one door, metal frame. Pipes running along the ceiling. The dripping was coming from somewhere behind me.

I tried to move my hands. The

rope

held.

I made myself breathe. Made myself think backward through what I remembered – Leo’s text, the back gate, the alley, the cloth pressed against my face. That was where it ended. I didn’t know how long I’d been

out. I didn’t know where I was.

A flashlight beam swung directly into my eyes.

“Well, look who’s finally awake.”

I turned my face away from the light and waited for my vision to adjust. The figure standing in front of it

was tall and lean, cheeks hollowed out, cap on backward. Something about the silhouette snagged at me,

and then the memory surfaced – a rainy night, the street outside my building, a face I’d clocked and then

dismissed.

My breath caught. “It’s you.”

Neil Dawson didn’t deny it. He walked toward me with the unhurried ease of someone who knew I had

nowhere to go. His eyes moved over me in a way that made every nerve in my body recoil – not the gaze of

someone sizing up a hostage, but something slower, more deliberate, more obscene. It traveled from my face down to my chest, to the way my white T–shirt had soaked through and plastered itself against my skin, and he didn’t bother to disguise what he was looking at.

He made a sound low in his throat. Appreciative. Hungry.

* Chepke 728 The Renamon

My stomach lurched so violently I had to clench my jaw.

He crouched down and grabbed my chin, tilting my face up hard. His thumb pressed into the hinge of my jaw with just enough pressure to make clear he could press harder. Up close, I could smell him – stale cigarettes, something sour underneath. His eyes moved over my face the way a hand moves over something it’s already decided to take.

“You really are something,” he said softly. “Didn’t expect that.”

He reached to his waist and pulled out a folding knife. He didn’t open the blade – not yet. He dragged the flat of it slowly along my cheekbone, down the line of my jaw, and then lower, tracing the collar of my shirt with the spine of the knife. Deliberate. Unhurried. Like he was enjoying the fact that I couldn’t pull away.

“Been a long time,” he murmured, almost to himself, “since I had something worth keeping.”

His gaze dropped again. He let it linger. He didn’t pretend otherwise.

The nausea rolled through me in waves. I breathed through my nose and kept my face still and thought: *don’t let him see it, don’t give him that.*

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