My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 109

The Dubal Night Race

~Katia~

Sam walked into my room at ten RM without knocking. She never knocked when something was urgent. She put her phone in my face and let me read the headline myself.

Windsor Wife Claims Catwoman Identity – Exclusive.

There was a photograph of Delia in a borrowed racing suit, smiling at every camera like she had spent her life earning the right to stand in front of one. The article was three paragraphs long and quoted her directly. Some people call me Catwoman. Between

1. us.

I read the whole thing. Then I handed Sam her phone back.

“Okay,” I said.

Sam stared at me. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

“What would you like me to say, Sam?”

“She just told the entire racing world she’s you, Kat. She is sitting in Dubai in a suit she borrowed from the WEG hospitality wardrobe, claiming to be Catwoman.”

“She told them she’s Catwoman,” I said. “In three hours Catwoman is going to get in a car and race. The world will work out the rest on its own.”

Sam looked at me for a long moment. Then she started laughing. Not a polite laugh. The kind of laugh that comes out when something is so absurd that your body does not know what else to do with it.

“Fine,” she said, pulling herself together. “Fine. Let’s go.”

The circuit was in the industrial port district, three kilometres south of the city. It was two kilometres of decommissioned asphalt that ran along the Dubai waterfront, with the Gulf on one side and the old port infrastructure on the other. There were no official signs, no public announcement, and no entry without a confirmed grid position. The organisers brought their own lighting rigs and their own timing systems. Everything else was the drivers.

Twelve cars on the grid. Start time one AM.

I had raced this circuit twice before. I knew the first corner, which was tight and punishing if you arrived too fast. I knew the back straight, which was long enough to push well above 150 kilometres per hour with the Gulf running alongside you in the dark. I knew the chicane sequence in the middle, which separated the confident drivers from the genuinely good ones. And I knew the final bend before the main straight, which had just enough camber to reward anyone brave enough to trust it

completely.

I knew this track. Tonight I intended to use everything I knew.

I was doing my pre–race checks when Sarn’s voice came through my earpiece.

“Kat.”

“I hear you.”

“Grid four. Black car. No markings. No registration.” She paused for a moment. “It’s The Anonymous Racer.”

I stopped what I was doing.

I had been racing The Anonymous Racer’s records since France, six years ago. He had set a Monaco time that made me so furious I bought a plane ticket and flew there specifically to beat it. Since then we had traded records across six countries and four circuits, and I had never once been on the same grid as him. I had studied every piece of footage that existed of him racing. I knew his driving style the way you knew something you had spent years trying to defeat. I had never seen his face. Nobody had.

1/3

The Dube: ht Race

+25 Bonus

Tonight he was four positions away from me on the starting grid.

“Copy,” I said.

“How do you want to handle it?

I looked across the grid at the black car. The driver was sitting completely still inside it. No movement, no nerves, no adjustment. Just a driver who had done this many times before and was ready.

“The same way I always handle it,” I said. “I win.”

The starter raised the flag.

The grid went quiet the way grids always went quiet in the last few seconds before a start. Every driver alone in their own head. Every engine at idle and waiting.

The flag dropped.

The Anonymous Racer took the lead before the first corner. That was his signature, and I knew it from every piece of footage I had ever studied on him. He did not fight for the lead at the start. He simply drove to it before anyone else had decided what to do, and by the time the field reached the first corner, he already had a two–second gap over everyone else.

I was through the field and into second position by the time we hit the back straight on lap one. I settled two car lengths behind him, and I assessed what I was looking at.

He was good. He was genuinely, completely, infuriatingly good. His braking was precise. His lines through the corners were clean and efficient. He wasted nothing and he gave nothing away. The gap between us stayed at exactly two car lengths through lap one and lap two because every time I pushed, he had already accounted for it and responded.

On lap three I stopped being patient.

I took him on the back straight. I pulled alongside him approaching the chicane, and for one moment we were exactly level, side by side on two hundred metres of Dubai asphalt in the dark. Two drivers who had been chasing each other’s records across the world for six years, and this was the first time we had ever been in the same race at the same time. Then I was through the chicane first, and I was ahead, and I did not give the gap back.

He came at me on lap four. He found something extra that he had been keeping in reserve, and he came at me hard through the chicane sequence and pulled alongside me on the back straight again. He held the position longer than anyone had ever managed alongside me before. He was testing me. He wanted to see what I had left.

I had more.

The final corner. I committed to it completely. I took the maximum entry speed the bend would allow, I trusted the camber, and I came out of it with everything the car could give. He followed my line, but he could not match my exit speed. That was the race.

I crossed the finish line first.

Six minutes and eleven seconds. A new circuit record by eleven seconds.

The crowd at the finish erupted. I did not stop. That was the rule. You win, and you leave, and you are gone before anyone thought to follow. I took the northeast exit, and I drove into the dark, and within ninety seconds the circuit was behind me, and there was nothing in my mirrors.

Sam was in my ear. “You won, Kat. New record. Clean exit.” A pause. “The Anonymous Racer finished second. He came within four seconds of your record. Nobody has ever come that close to you before.”

“I know,” I said.

“Who is he?”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify