My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 159

The War Toble

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The War Table

~Julian –

She arrived at noon exactly.

I was already at the head of the war room table when the door opened and Katia walked in. She had come from somewhere meeting, a call, whatever her morning had contained and she had not had time to change or slow down. She was in the clothes she had started the day in, her hair still neat, her posture the same as it always was. Like nothing could touch her.

She saw me and crossed the room and sat two seats to my left and opened her laptop and did not look at me again for forty seconds while she pulled up her files.

I was watching her for all forty seconds.

She knew it. She did not acknowledge it.

The legal teams filed in around us

Marcus and his team from I*; Reid and my senior counsel from WEG; four associates between them; laptops and files; and the focused energy of people who understood that the work in this room mattered.

We worked.

The tritical piece came at hour two.

a

My intelligence team had pulled Victor’s full corporate history – not just Halo Systems but everything that preceded it. The pre- startup. The filing records. The IP transfer documentation.

Victor’s startup had been dissolved. That much we already knew. What we had not fully confirmed until this morning was the entity the IP had been transferred to a government body, as part of a regulatory compliance filing, fourteen months before Katia acquired Meridian.

Fourteen months.

–

Victor had surrendered the IP he was now claiming was stolen before Katia ever touched the company.

I put the document on the table.

The room went very quiet.

Katia reached across and picked it up. Her hand came within inches of mine on the table, and I felt the proximity of it – the awareness of someone whose presence I had been calibrating against my own for months. She did not look at me. She read the document.

“Fourteen months,” she said.

“Fourteen months,” I confirmed.

She set it down. She looked at Marcus. “He has no legal claim.”

“Not to the IP,” Marcus said. “Not to anything prior to the dissolution. The chain of ownership is clean from Katia’s acquisition onwards.” He paused. “The litigation is entirely without foundation.”

“It was never about winning,” Katia said. She was still looking at the document. “It was about the press. The noise. The damage to reputation before the renewal evaluation.” She looked up. Not at Marcus. At me.

held her gaze.

There was something in her eyes that moved through me

not anger, not relief. Something more complicated. The look of a woman who had been fighting something for a long time and had just found the ground under her feet.

“Counter–filing,” I said. “Fraud. Criminal fabrication of evidence. We file today.”

The Wor Table

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The room moved.

Hour five.

The legal teams had been in the adjacent conference room for twenty minutes finalising the counterfiling language. The war room had emptied around us without either of us noticing until it was just the two of us and the table between us and the quiet.

I poured water from the jug on the table and slid a glass toward her. My hand brushed hers as she reached for it at the same moment – barely, just the edge of my fingers against hers and she went very still for a half second before she wrapped her

hand around the glass.

She did not look at me.

I looked at her.

At the line of her throat as she swallowed. At the way she set the glass down carefully, with both hands, like she needed a moment to do something ordinary.

“He’s going to lose,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“But he’s going to keep coming.”

She met my eyes. “So am I.”

There was a moment after that

not long, eleven minutes in total- where neither of us spoke, and the city moved outside the window, and the quiet had the quality of a space where something significant had been decided.

I was very aware of her.

The way she sat straight but not rigid. The way she turned her water glass slowly in her hands when she was thinking. The way she breathed, quietly, without knowing I was paying attention to it.

At some point she stood and walked to the window and looked out at the city, and I stood too, without deciding to, and came to stand beside her. Not close – a professional distance. But close enough that when she turned her head slightly, the warmth of hers reached me. Close enough that I caught the scent of her hair when she moved.

She was talking about the counter–filing timeline. I was processing it. Approximately half of my attention was on the words, and the other half was on the two inches of space between her shoulder and mine.

I did not close it.

“The government renewal evaluation starts in four weeks,” she said. “If the fraud complaint lands before the evaluation begins

11

“It lands before,” I said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

She looked at me sideways. Just briefly. Then back at the window. “You’ve been working on this for a while.”

“Since Victor filed,” I said.

“Before that,” she said. It was not a question.

“Yes,” I said. “Before that.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she turned to face me, and we were closer than I had registered

the window behind her,

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