My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 191

The Ring Nobody Can Explain

-Delia-

I read the article three times.

The first time I was furious. Katia had taken our family

my family, the Kensingtons, people who had worked for generations to build something respectable and laid them out in a national magazine like evidence at a trial. A twenty–year–old thrown out while pregnant. A family that didn’t know their grandson’s middle game. She had made them sound like monsters.

She had made them sound exactly like what they were, which was the most infuriating part.

The second time I read it, I was looking for ammunition. Something I could use. Something she had said that crossed a line or misrepresented something. There was nothing. She had been precise and careful, and everything she had said was technically true and technically devastating, and there was no angle from which to attack it without confirming it.

The third time I read it, I saw the ring.

I was scrolling through the photographs – her at the desk, her by the car, her and Aiden side by side in his navy shirt – and I almost missed it. It was not the focus of the photograph. The photographer had not put it there deliberately. It was simply on her hand, and the light had caught it, and if you were not looking for it, you would not see it.

I was not looking for it.

But I saw it.

Old silver. A stone that looked red and deep and alive in a way that cheap jewellery did not look alive. The craftsmanship of something made by someone who had taken time and care and skill and produced something that would outlast everyone who ever looked at it.

I had seen that ring before. It’s a pain in the ass that it sure looks more expensive than mine.

Not once in all the months of watching Katia at family events and Windsor lunches and birthday parties. She had never worn it in front of anyone not that I had seen, at least the last time i saw it was when she was pregnant. And now here it was in a national magazine on her left hand as if she had decided, for this one photograph, to let the world see it.

My mystery sister and her mystery husband and his mystery ring.

I picked up my phone.

Victor answered on the second ring.

“I read the article,” he said before I could speak.

“Good,” I said. “Then you saw the ring.”

A pause. “What ring?”

“The photograph. Her and the boy. Her left hand.” I paused. “Look at it.”

I heard him moving. Pulling something up on a screen.

Then silence.

“That,” he said slowly, “is not a cheap piece.”

“No,” I said.

“That is the kind of piece that comes from somewhere significant,” he said. “Old money. Old craftsmanship. The kind of thing that is made for someone, not bought for someone.” Another pause. “Where did she get it?”

“That,” I said, “is exactly what I would like to know.”

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The Ring Nobo Com Explor

“Her husband,” Victor said.

+25 BONUS

“Her mystery husband,” said “The one nobody has ever met. The one nobody can find. The one who apparently gave her a ring worth more than most people’s houses and then disappeared from public record so completely that my investigator has been looking for six months and found nothing.”

Victor was quiet for a moment. I could hear him thinking the particular quality of silence that meant he was not absent, he was fully present and processing.

“I’ve had my own people look into her financial history,” he said. “Before 1* Technologies there is almost nothing. The trail goes cold completely.” He paused. “That level of invisibility is not accidental. Someone helped construct it.”

“The husband,” I said.

“Or the husband’s resources,” Victor said. “A man with enough money to give a woman a ring like that has enough money to keep his name out of records he does not want it in.” He paused. “What do we actually know about him?”

“Nothing,” I said. “A first name. Possibly. Maybe not even that.” I looked at the photograph on my phone. At the ring. “She was in Las Vegas when she was twenty. She came back pregnant. And somewhere in those six years she acquired a company, a Harvard education, and a husband that nobody can find.”

“Las Vegas,” Victor said. He said it the way people said things when they were filing them carefully. “Interesting.”

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“My investigator went as far back as he could,” I said. “The financial history before I* is sealed. The marriage records — if there

– are not findable through normal channels. Whoever this man is, he has covered every trace.” I paused. “But the ring exists. And it is sitting on her hand in a magazine, and somebody who knows what they are looking at is going to recognise it eventually.”

“You don’t recognise it?” Victor said.

“I know it’s significant,” I said. “I don’t know whose it is.”

“Leave that with me,” Victor said. “I have contacts in estate jewellery, in auction houses, and in private collections. If that ring has a history – and a piece like that always has a history – I will find it.”

“And if you find it?” I said.

“Then we find the husband,” he said. “And if we find the husband, we find out exactly who Katia Kensington really is and where all of that invisible money came from.” He paused. “Which is, I suspect, a story that is going to be very useful to both of us.”

I looked at the ring in the photograph one more time.

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