My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 135

She’s Fucking Mine!

-Julian-

The report landed at midnight.

Reid sent it with no commentary – just the file, the timestamp, and a photograph. Katia Kensingtoni at a restaurant in Tribeca. Private room. Victor sat across the table from her. His hand over hers. The photograph was taken through the window from street level, and it was grainy, but it was enough.

It was more than enough to make me want to burn the city to the ground.

I stared at the image until the edges of my vision blurred into a jagged, pulsing red. I knew Victor was dangerous. I had the full file on him. I had watched him move in Dubai with the smooth, deliberate confidence of a predator. I had tracked every corporate attack, every planted article, every fucking cent of that bounty.

What I had not known, what I could not fathom, was that she would go to dinner with him. Alone. Without telling me.

The rage didn’t arrive as a wave; it arrived as a detonator. I swept a heavy crystal decanter off my desk, watching it shatter against the floor, the amber liquid staining the rug like a wound. “Motherfucker,” I hissed, my voice a broken snarl.

I called Zane at twelve thirty. My hand was shaking so violently I almost dropped the phone.

“I know,” Zane said immediately. “I saw the report.”

“She went to him,” I said, the words feeling like shards of glass in my throat.

“Yes.”

“She sat across from Victor Hale and had dinner and did not fucking tell me, Zane!” I roared, the sound echoing off the wood- panelled walls. “She let him touch her. Look at the photograph. He has his hand on her. He’s claiming her right in front of the goddamn window.”

“Julian.” Zane’s voice had the tone it got when he was about to say something I needed to hear and was not going to enjoy.” Before you do whatever you’re thinking about doing—”

“I’m going to her apartment. I’m going to drag her out of there and-

“I know. Don’t.”

“Zane, don’t you fucking start with me-

11

“You are not her husband,” he said flatly. “You are not her anything officially. Beyond that, you are still very much married to her sister, Julian. You need to be extremely careful what you do and where you show up at this hour. You do not get to show up at her apartment at midnight because she had dinner with someone you don’t like.”

I stood up and kicked the heavy desk chair, sending it skidding across the room, where it splintered against the baseboard. “You think this is just someone I don’t like? I heard the wire, Zane. I heard that piece of shit tell her he wanted to rub his cock between her thighs. My thighs! Katia’s thighs are mine! He was talking about ruining her while he bought her sea bass. And she sat there. She played along. She fucking giggled.”

“She was protecting the mission,” Zane said. “She was playing the part.”

I stepped toward the window, my reflection looking like a stranger’s — eyes wired, a man on the edge of a violent break. “I don’t give a fuck about the mission! You want to know why I’m mad? Because she’s mine to fuck. She’s mine to ruin. Not some motherfucker like Victor Hale. I am the only one who gets to see her fall apart. I am the only one who gets to taste her. If he so much as thinks about those thighs again, I will dismantle every brick of his life.”

Silence on the other end. Then Zane breathed, “You’re acting like a lunatic. You’re acting like she’s your property.”

“She is mine,” I snapped, then hung up.

+25 BONUS

I looked at the photograph for another ten minutes. Victor’s hand over hers. His body angled toward her. Then I picked up my phone and typed, ‘Hale is not what he told you.‘

I sent it. I stared at the ceiling for forty minutes of agonizing silence. Something sa low and tight in my chest, a possessive rot that did not respond to logic.

My phone lit up. I know. But he said something interesting. Tell me, I typed. Not tonight.

I stared at the screen. Not tonight. She had gone to dinner with him, let him touch her hand – I had seen the photograph; I knew what that looked like, and had come home and was now shutting me out.

I stood up from my desk and walked to the window. I thought about the three words she’d sent and the fact that she had not told me she was going. Had not mentioned it. I knew her – I had spent thirty days noticing everything about her – and I knew she had a reason.

That did not make the photograph easier to look at. It made me want to kill.

I called Zane back. “She said he told her something interesting. And she told me ‘not tonight.‘ She’s managing me, Zane. Just like she was managing him.”

“Julian,” Zane sighed. “Go to bed. You are in love with a woman while still married to her sister. This is the situation you created.

“I am going to be anything but calm about this,” I said, ignoring him. “When I see her tomorrow, I’m going to make sure she remembers who she belongs to. Hale doesn’t get a single thought. He doesn’t get a single look.”

I closed the photograph, but the image was seared into my brain. At three AM my phone lit up again.

He claims Meridian’s algorithm was stolen from him. If he’s right, I*‘s foundation is compromised. We need to talk tomorrow.

I read it twice. Then the second text came:

He had his hands all over me by the way. Just thought you should know.

I stared at the screen for a full minute, my breath coming in ragged, predatory gasps. She was poking the bear. She knew exactly what that sentence would do to me. She was challenging the claim.

I typed back, ‘I know.‘ I have the photograph. Three seconds. Of course you do.

I put the phone down. I was not going to sleep. I was going to spend the next four hours imagining exactly how I was going to mark her tomorrow -how I was going to erase Victor Hale’s lingering touch with a possessiveness that would leave her with no doubt whose hands were allowed to be on her.

r

Tomorrow wasn’t just a conversation. It was a reclaiming. And I was going to ruin anyone who got in the way.

+25 BONUS

Alden Looks Like My Brother

-Katia-

Thursday evenings with Gail were the one thing in my week that didn’t require management.

No agenda, no strategy, no performance. Just wine and bad television and Aiden asleep in the guest room by eight thirty and Gail on the other end of the sofa with her feet tucked under her and the specific ease of someone who had been your person for long enough that silence between you was never uncomfortable.

We were on our third glass when she said it.

“Can I ask you something weird?”

I looked at her. “You’re three glasses in. Everything you ask is going to be weird.”

“This is a particular kind of weird,” she said. She was looking at her wine, not af me.

“Go ahead.”

She was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant she had been sitting on something for a while and had decided tonight was the night and was now second–guessing that decision in real time.

$

“Aiden,” she said.

I kept my face completely still.

“His jaw,” she said. “His hands. The way he laughs.” She paused. “The way he tilts his head when he’s thinking about

something.”

I said nothing.

“I know this sounds completely mad,” Gail said. She finally looked at me. Her eyes were steady, but there was something behind them – the visible discomfort of someone saying something they have been trying not to say for a long time. “But he looks like my brother. He looks like Julian, Kat.”

The television was still on. Some reality show neither of us had been watching for the last hour. The sound of it filled the room for a few seconds.

“That’s an interesting observation,” I said.

My voice came out completely level. I was proud of that.

Gail looked at me. “Katia.”

“It’s late, Gail.”

“I’m not drunk enough to be imagining things,” she said quietly. “I have been around that boy since he was three months old. I have watched him grow up. And I have watched my brother for years.” She set her glass down. “The jaw. The way they both tilt their head left when they’re concentrating. The hands.” She paused. “I’m not imagining it.”

I looked at the television.

I thought about what to say. About the wall I had been hitting for a year – I had never met Julian before the WEG partnership; it’s impossible, it has to be impossible – and about the fact that the wall was getting thinner every day. Every time Aiden tilted his head. Every time Julian laughed the real laugh, I heard an echo of something I could not place. Every time Sam looked at me across a room with that expression.

“Gail,” I said. “I don’t push on this.”

She was quiet.

+25 BONUS

“I don’t know who Aiden’s father is, Gail,” I said. That was true. That was still true. I had a feeling I had been carrying for months, a feeling that had been getting louder and harder to manage, but a feeling was not a fact. “I had one night. Six years ago. I don’t remember it cleary, and I never found out who he was.” I paused. “What I know is that Aiden looks nothing like me. He never has. He has someone else’s face entirely, and I have spent five years looking at it and wondering.”

“And now you’re wondering about Julian,” Gail said.

It was not a question.

I looked at her.

“I’m not pushing,” she said immediately. She held up her hand. “I said I wouldn’t push, and I won’t. I just needed to say it. I’ve been sitting on it for years, and I needed to say it out loud to someone.”

“And now you’ve said it,” I said.

“And now I’ve said it.” She picked up her wine glass. “I won’t mention it again unless you want to talk about it.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Not yet.”

“Okay.”

“Gafl.”

“I said okay, Kat.”

We sat with it for a moment. The television muttered on. Outside Manhattan did what it always did unhelpfully.

I refilled her glass. She let me. I refilled mine,

We went back to watching the television.

But Gail’s hands weren’t quite steady when she picked up her glass.

And neither were mine.

moved indifferently,

We didn’t talk about it again that night. We watched two more episodes of the show and finished the wine, and Gail fell asleep on the sofa at some point, and I put a blanket over her and checked on Aiden, deeply, completely asleep, one arm thrown over the edge of the bed the way he always slept, and stood in his doorway for the thirty seconds I always stood there.

I looked at his face in the dark.

The jaw. The hands. The way his head was tilted slightly left even in sleep.

He looks like my brother.

I had known Gail for years. She was not a dramatic person. She did not make things up or see things that weren’t there. She was careful and warm and deeply loyal, and she had been around Aiden since he was three months old, and she had just told me, three glasses of wine in, that her godson looked like her brother.

I went to my room.

I sat on the edge of my bed.

I thought about Julian’s office. About his hand at my face and the promise he had made and the way he had said, ‘I will fix this‘ with the complete certainty of a man who kept his word.

I thought about a night in Las Vegas six years ago that I remembered in fragments. A bar. Two men whose faces I had never seen clearly at a bar. Something warm and real that had existed for one night and had left me with the most important thing in my

life.

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