My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 137

Victor’s Uffer

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Katia-

The proposal arrived on a Wednesday morning via a courier.

Not email. Not through a legal team. A physical document in a sealed envelope delivered to I* Technologies reception, addressed to me personally and marked ‘private‘. Which told me two things immediately – Victor wanted me to know he knew my office address, and he wanted this to feel personal rather than corporate.

Sam brought it in without opening it. She put it on my desk and looked at it like it might bite.

“Open it,” I said.

She opened it.

We read it together in silence.

It was twelve pages. Clean, professionally formatted, the kind of document that took weeks to prepare. Not an acquisition offer this time. Not the forty per cent stake that I had dismissed in Dubai in under two minutes. This was something else entirely.

Victor Hale was proposing an alliance.

Equal partnership. I* Technologies and Halo Systems operating as co–vendors on major government infrastructure contracts. Joint bidding on the renewal – the Ministry of Defence contract that had started everything five years ago, the one Meridian had won and that was coming back up for tender in twelve months. Both companies on the vendor list. Resources pooled. Technology shared. Victor’s government relationships combined with I*‘s architecture.

On paper it was extraordinary. The financial projections were the most aggressive I had seen in three years of reading acquisition proposals. The market penetration numbers for the combined entity were almost impossible to argue with.

I closed the document.

“He’s good,” I said.

“He’s terrifying,” Sam said. “That proposal took months to build. He had this ready before Dubai. Before the dinner. Before the article.” She sat down across from my desk. “This was always the endgame, Kat. The article, the bounty, the acquisition offer those were pressure tactics. This is what he actually wanted.”

“A seat next to me,” I said.

“He can’t beat you,” Sam said. “So he wants to buy a seat next to you. ‘Equal partners means he has access to everything – our architecture, our client relationships, our government contacts, and everything Julian has helped build through the WEG partnership.” She paused. “And the WEG contract renegotiation clause. If this goes through, he gets a seat on the Windsor Empire Group vendor list. He gets Julian’s infrastructure relationships through the back door.”

I looked at the document.

“And if I say no?” I said.

“He goes back to trying to destroy you,” Sam said. “Probably harder. The bounty is still live. The false data pipeline we fed through Daniel is going to run out of road eventually. And he has Delia.” She said the last part carefully, watching my face.

we don’t know the full picture yet.” Whatever Delia told him at that Aman dinner

I stood up and walked to the window.

The proposal was strong. Genuinely, impressively strong. If it had come from anyone else in any other context, I would have had my legal team review it seriously. The combined entity would be formidable. The government contract would be winnable. The financial case was almost airtight.

But Victor had spent eighteen months trying to dismantle my company. He had posted a bounty to unmask my identity. He had

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sat across from me at a dinner with his hand on my thigh, telling me he had imagined me in ways that made my skin crawl. He had taken whatever Delia had given him and was building it into something I could not yet see the full shape of.

A man like that did not offer equal partnership because he had decided to be reasonable.

He offered it because he had run the numbers and decided that owning half of something was better than destroying it entirely. He offered it because the government contract renewal was twelve months away and he needed I*‘s technology to win it. He offered it because he had decided that getting close to me professionally was the fastest route to whatever he actually wanted.

What did he actually want?

That was the question I kept arriving at. The corporate attack, the bounty, the dinner, the alliance proposal – they did not add up to a coherent strategy unless there was something underneath all of it that I had not yet identified Victor was not a man who operated without a coherent strategy.

“Seventy–two hours,” I said.

Sam looked up. “You’re going to consider it?”

“I’m going to tell him I’m considering it,” I said. “I need the time to figure out what he’s actually after. Because it’s not the contract and it’s not the company and it’s not me.” I turned from the window. “There’s something else. Something that has been driving this from the beginning and that I haven’t found yet.”

“Julian might know,” Sam said quietly.

I thought about Julian. About the file he had been building on Victor. About Sir Edmund and the government committee and the eighteen–month timeline that had started before I had even gone public with I*. About the conversation we still needed to have

the one that kept getting interrupted by Victor or Delia or the thirty days of proximity or my own inability to sit still long enough to have it properly.

“Julian does know,” I said. “Or he knows part of it.” I picked up my phone. “I’ll call him after I send Victor the seventy–two- hour response.”

“And then?” Sam said.

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