My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 124

Could xet boreda Kensington

Could Kat be Katia Kensington

-Katia~

The Monaco invitation arrived three weeks before the I* tech summit.

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Encrypted message, underground circuit contacts, the usual routing. The race was on a Thursday, the night before the summit’s final day, which meant I would be sleeping two hours and presenting to four hundred people on the energy of pure adrenaline. Sam had looked at the schedule and said nothing for ten seconds and then said, “You’re going to do it anyway.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“I’ll book a later checkout,” she said.

The old Grand Prix circuit at 2 AM was something I had been waiting two years to run. Not the modern circuit, but the original one, the one that existed before barriers and safety redesigns, the one that ran through the streets of Monaco the way the city itself ran tight and unforgiving and absolutely beautiful. The underground circuit used approximately sixty per cent of the original layout. Enough to feel it.

Sixteen riders. Invitation only. The kind of race that existed because enough serious money had decided it should.

I suited up in the hotel garage at one–thirty. The helmet, gloves, and the Ducati already warm. Sam was in my ear on comms, running the same operation she always ran–monitoring Julian’s security feeds from New York, tracking drone activity, and watching the entry and exit routes.

“Julian’s security team is dark tonight,” she said. “No active surveillance in Monaco.”

“He’s in New York,” I said.

“Confirmed. His keycard put him in his Manhattan office at six PM your time. Meeting ran late.” She paused. “He called you this afternoon, by the way.”

“I know. I’ll call him back after.”

“Kat.”

“After,”

“I said. “Focus.”

The circuit was everything the footage had promised and more.

Monaco at 2 AM was a specific kind of silence – the city pressed in on all sides, the buildings close, and the barriers tighter than anything I had run on an open circuit. The Ducati felt different here than on open asphalt. More alive. More demanding. Every input mattered more when the margin for error was measured in centimetres rather than metres.

I took the lead on lap two.

The field was good

genuinely good, with three or four riders who had no business being anything other than exactly where they were, pushing me through the hairpin sequences in a way that required full attention and full commitment. One of them stayed with me for four laps, close enough that I could hear his engine behind mine on the straights.

Then I found something in the tunnel section.

The tunnel on the old circuit was a specific piece of physics the way the sound changed, the way the light disappeared and the darkness required you to trust your line completely without visual confirmation. I had studied it. I had run it in my head a hundred times. In the actual tunnel at 2 AM on a Ducati at speed, the theory and the reality collapsed into a single thing that had no name except the right.

I came out of the tunnel and opened the throttle, and that was the race.

Twelve seconds. New circuit record.

dio Kensington

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–

1 was gone before the crowd had finished reacting a standard exit, two pre–planned routes, and Sam calling the clean path. Out of the circuit and into the city’s back streets, the Ducati dropped to legal speed before anything official noticed.

“Clean exit,” Sam said. Beautiful. Twelve seconds, Kat. Twelve.”

“I know,” I said. I was already thinking about the tunnel. About the specific physics of it. About the fact that I wanted to run it again immediately.

“Your hotel is eight minutes north,” Sam said. “The summit breakfast is at seven.”

“I know.”

“You should sleep.”

“I know, Sam.”

I rode north through Monaco at three in the morning with the city asleep around me and thought about nothing except the tunnel and the throttle and the twelve seconds and the specific aliveness of doing something you were built for.

~Julian’s POV~

Reid called me at four AM New York time.

“Monaco,” he said. “Catwoman. She just won an invitation–only circuit race on the old Grand Prix layout. Motorbike. Twelve seconds ahead of the field.” He pause and then continued. “The crowd footage is already global.”

I was awake immediately. I pulled up the feeds on my laptop.

The footage was everywhere – multiple angles, phone cameras, the specific chaos of a crowd that had just seen something extraordinary and was documenting it in real time. Catwoman on a Ducati through the Monaco streets, the tunnel section, and the exit speed out of it.

I watched the tunnel clip four times.

Then I opened my calendar.

The I* Technologies European tech summit. Monaco. This week. I had the full itinerary – WEG was a co–sponsor of three of the sessions. The summit’s final dinner was tonight. It had ended at 10 PM according to the published schedule.

Four hours between the dinner ending and the race starting.

I had been in New York. My hotel in Monaco – I had stayed there two months ago for a separate meeting – was three blocks from the section of the circuit visible in the crowd footage.

I pulled up Katia’s location data from the WEG security system. Her key card had accessed her hotel room at eleven fifteen PM. Then nothing until, I checked, seven fourteen AM when she accessed the breakfast floor.

Eight hours of keycard silence.

I sat at my desk at four in the morning in Manhattan and looked at the footage of Catwoman coming out of the Monaco tunnel, and I thought about a woman who had been four hours away from a motorbike race and eight blocks from the circuit and whose keycard said she had been in her hotel room all night.

I thought about Sam.

Sam who managed everything. Sam, who always knew exactly where to stand and exactly what to say and exactly when to take a champagne glass from someone’s hand.

I opened my desk drawer.

The marriage certificate was where it always was. I took it out. Looked at it. The two names. Jules. Kat.

ensington

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I thought about Katia Kensington, who had appeared in New York six years ago with a son and a company and no explanation for any of it.

I thought about the tunnel section.

I closed the certificate.

“Kat Kensington,” I said quietly to the empty office. “You absolute hurricane.”

I picked up my phone and called her.

Eye fuck Each Other

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I See The Way You Eye–fuck Each Other

Katia~

Gail had described it as a small birthday party.

Thirty children, seventeen adults, a bouncy castle in the garden, and a woman whose name I never caught who kept offering ine mini quiches. Small was a relative concept when Gail was organising something.

Aiden had been ready an hour early. He had put on his good shirt without being asked–the navy one he reserved for occasions he had decided mattered–and had spent the car ride explaining to me the structural differences between two types of go–kart chassis with the focused energy of someone who had been saving this information for the right audience.

“Will there be anyone there who knows about racing?” he asked.

“It’s a six–year–old’s birthday party,” I said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

I had no answer for that, so I said nothing and drove.

We had been there forty minutes when Julian arrived.

He was dropping Gail off; that was obvious from the way he pulled up. The car barely stopped, Gail already opening her door. He was not dressed for a children’s birthday party. He was dressed for whatever he had been doing before this, which was clearly something that required a suit, and the suit was good and he looked exactly like a man who had not planned to stay.

Then Aiden saw him.

“It’s the racing simulator, man!”

He said it loudly. With the complete, uncomplicated joy of a child who has spotted someone they were genuinely pleased to see and has no interest in moderating that information. He was across the garden in six seconds.

Julian looked up. He looked at Aiden running toward him. Something moved in his expression, not surprise exactly, something warmer than that. He crouched down to Aiden’s level before Aiden reached him, which meant he was ready, which meant he had understood immediately what the correct response to a five–year–old running at you full speed was.

Aiden skidded to a stop in front of him.

“You came,” Aiden said.

“I was dropping Gail off,” Julian said.

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Aiden looked at him with the clear–eyed assessment he gave everything. “You should stay,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

Julian looked up. Found me across the garden. Our eyes met for a second. I gave him nothing. He looked back at Aiden.

“What do you want to show me?” he said.

I stopped tracking the conversation after that. I moved to the food table because I needed to be doing something with my hands, and the food table was available and provided the specific cover of appearing to be interested in the mini quiches.

Sam appeared beside me seven minutes later.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You have a face.”

verfuck Each Other

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“I always have a face,” Sam said. She looked across the garden. Juliar and Aiden were in the corner by the garden wall, deep in something on Julian’s phone. Aiden’s head was tilted left. Julian’s head was tilted the same way. “Kat.”

“Sam.”

“I don’t understand it,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Not dramatic, just honest. “I don’t understand why Julian looks so much like Aiden. The jaw. The way they both tilt their heads. The hands.” She paused. “The fact that it wasn’t him in Vegas doesn’t make sense to me. Because that boy looks so much like him it’s starting to be impossible to look at them in the same space and not see it.”

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