My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 153

Thoughts

+25 BONUS

Thoughts

~Katia-

I drove myself home. I didn’t take Aiden with me. Just the car and the city and forty minutes of silence that I needed more than I had needed anything in a long time.

I had said things at that lunch that I had not said to anyone except Samantha. Things I had been carrying for six years in the sealed compartment I kept for information too heavy to leave anywhere accessible. The Vegas night. The marriage certificate. Jules. The ring in the box by my bed that I had never been able to explain or get rid of or stop thinking about.

I had said all of it out loud. To Grandma Celeste Windsor.

Who had listened without judgement, without drama, and had then covered my hand with hers and told me not to worry. That she would help me find my husband.

I had believed her.

–

– though there was That was the part I was still sitting with as I drove. Not what I had confessed. Not the relief of having said it relief, more than I expected. What I was sitting with was the fact that I had believed her completely and immediately. Without question. Without the usual wall I put between myself and people who offered to help with things I had been managing alone.

I trusted Grandma Celeste.

I pulled into the underground car park below my building. Turned the engine off and sat inside my car.

The car park was quiet. Fluorescent light. The distant sound of the city existing above me.

I thought about Aiden at the Windsor estate; he was content and comfortable and calling her Gigi after forty minutes as if he had always had a Gigi. He adapted to things the way water adapted to containers. I had watched him do it his whole life, and it still undid me sometimes.

I thought about Julian. I didn’t know what I was doing with him, he was my sister’s husband, but God, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want him to fully fuck me. I liked him, but I was still married at the end of the day.

That was the part I had not said out loud at the lunch. The part that sat beneath everything else like something I had not yet a man with no face and no found language for. Grandma had asked about Jules, and I had talked about Jules as a stranger surname and no context except one night six years ago. I had talked about him the way I had been talking about him for six years, which was carefully and at a distance.

What I had not said was that somewhere in the last year the distance had been getting harder to maintain.

Not because of Julian. Not because of what had happened in his office or his server room or a car park in November. or even the desert. Not because of any of it in isolation.

Because of the accumulation of it. The thirty days of proximity. The way Sam had looked at me and said the things she said at the birthday party. The way Gail had looked at me over her third glass of wine. The way my own wall kept getting thinner every time I hit it – I had never met Julian before the WEG partnership – and lately when I said it in my head, it didn’t land the way it used

1. to.

I sat in the car park for twenty minutes.

Then I did not go upstairs.

I drove to the track.

Sam had a contact who managed a private circuit forty minutes outside the city. Closed on weekday evenings. Clean asphalt, good lighting, no cameras. I had been using it for two years when I needed to think without thinking

when the thing I was

processing was too large for a room and required speed to break it down into manageable parts.

The Ducati was already there. Sam had arranged it without being asked. She knew my patterns better than I did.

+25 BONUS

I suited up in the small equipment room. Helmet, gloves, leathers. The familiar sequence of it.

I did not think about Jules.

I did not think about Julian.

I did not think about Grandma’s hand over mine or the ring in the box by my bed or Aiden calling sumcone Gigi for the first time in his life with the ease of a child who had simply decided that was her name now.

I got on the bike.

And I went very, very fast.

The first lap was for the speed. The second lap was for the corner sequences – finding the right line, adjusting, correcting. The third lap was where the thinking stopped entirely, and there was only the track and the throttle and the pure mathematics of a machine moving through space at the limit of what physics would allow.

I did five laps. Then ten. Then I lost count.

–

Somewhere in the middle of it, the thing I had been carrying since the lunch began to settle. Not resolve – settle. The way things settled when you moved fast enough that the weight redistributed itself and stopped pressing on any one place so hard.

I care off the track at nine thirty PM.

Sat on the bike for a moment in the quiet.

The city was out there somewhere beyond the perimeter fence, doing what it always did – moving, indifferent, unhelpful. Manhattan had never once cared about any of my problems, and I had always found that useful.

I pulled out my phone.

One message from Sam: Aiden says Gigi is teaching him to play chess and that he is already very good at it.

I looked at the message for a moment.

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