My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 110

He Almost Catched Her

~Julian~

Fuck!

I sat in my car at the finish line for almost a full minute after the race ended.

I did not remove my helmet. I did not move. I just sat there with the fucking engine ticking as it cooled and thought about the car I had just watched disappear through the northeast exit.

Catwoman.

I had been two car lengths behind her for most of the race. I had pulled alongside her on the back straight twice. The second time I held it longer than I had held anything against any driver in fifteen years of racing. She had not flinched. She had not braked early or taken a wider line to shut me out. She had simply gone faster. Found something it the final corner that I could not match and taken it without hesitation.

She had beaten me by four seconds.

Four seconds. Nobody had ever beaten me by four seconds. Nobody had beaten me at all in the last three years. What the hell had just happened? I had come to this circuit tonight because the intelligence on Catwoman’s Dubai appearances was clear – she always raced this event, always won it, and always vanished immediately after. I had come to see her. To be in the same space as her. To understand, from inside a race rather than from the outside of one, who she actually was.

What I had not expected was to understand that she was the best driver I had ever faced.

Fuck!

I took the helmet off.

I called Zane.

“She’s already gone,” Zane said before I could speak. “Northeast exit. Drone picked her up for forty seconds, then lost her in the port infrastructure.”

“Get two cars on the northeast road,” I said. “Not to intercept. Just to follow and identify.”

“Already moving,” Zane said. “Julian – she’s fast. She knows the exit routes.”

“I know.” I got out of my car. “I’m going myself.”

“Julian-”

I hung up.

The northeast road ran along the edge of the industrial port. At two in the morning it was empty in both directions. Shipping containers stacked on the left. The Gulf Black is still on the right. The road surface was good asphalt with a thin layer of desert sand blown across it from the open ground to the north.

I drove fast. Faster than was strictly legal on a public road, which was not something I usually permitted myself. Tonight I did

not care.

Zane was in my ear. “Drone had her heading northwest. Then she turned into the port access road. Lost visual at the second container yard.”

“How long ago?”

“Eight minutes.”

Eight minutes. Damn it. In a fast car on an empty road that was a significant head start. She had planned this exit. She had

153

He Almost Stiched Her

+25 Bonus

studied the port layout the way she studied everything completely and in advance. She was not improvising. She was executing a plan she had built before she arrived.

I turned into the port access road.

The two pursuit vehicles Zane had deployed were parked at the entrance to the second contamer yard. Both drivers were out of their cars, looking at the ground.

I pulled up and got out.

One of the drivers pointed at the road surface.

–

There was a single tyre mark on the asphalt. Not a skid a sharp controlled turn. The kind of mark left by a driver who had changed direction at speed with complete precision. No drama. Just physics applied correctly.

I crouched down.

I pressed my fingers to the mark.

Still warm.

Fucking hell.

She had been here minutes ago. Minutes. The distance between us at this moment was the length of time it took me to get out of my car at the finish line and make two phone calls. If I had moved faster. If I had left immediately. If I had—

I stood up.

I looked north along the port road. Empty. I looked south. Empty. I looked at the container yard to my left – a maze of steel boxes stacked six high with dozens of exit points, impossible to search in the dark.

She was gone.

God damn it!

The Dubai night was warm and enormous around me. The Gulf was somewhere to the east, invisible but present, the salt of it in the air. The port cranes stood against the sky like dark architecture. Everything was still and empty and beautiful in the specific way that Dubai was beautiful at two in the morning when the city had stopped performing and was just itself.

I stood in the street in a suit that had cost more than most people made in a month and looked at a tyre mark in the sand.

And then I said it.

Out loud. Quietly. To nobody.

“Katia.”

The name sat in the warm air for a moment and then disappeared.

r

It was not a question. It was not quite a certainty either – not yet, not with the evidence I had, not with what I could prove. It was something in between. A theory that had become too precise to remain a theory. A shape that had too many specific edges to be anything other than what it was.

Catwoman raced in the same cities as I* Technologies expanded into. Catwoman’s calendar never conflicted with 1 board meetings. Catwoman had sent fifteen cease and desist letters through a shell entity two days after the WEG–1* tech showcase. Catwoman drove like someone who had been doing this since before she was old enough to do it legally. Catwoman had beaten me tonight by four seconds and had not shown the slightest surprise at finding The Anonymous Racer on her grid.

Katia Kensington’s keycard said she was in the hotel spa.

The audacity of it. The sheer, brilliant, infuriating audacity. She had someone use her keycard to create an alibi while she raced.

He Almost Sdfched Her

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