My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 224

Little Brat

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Delia-

I called him at nine in the morning.

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Marcus—not his real name; nobody in his line of work used their real name—had been my private investigator for eight months. He had found things I had not expected him to find. He had also consistently failed to find the one thing I actually needed, which was any usable information about Katia Kensington’s private life.

He answered on the third ring.

“Tell me you have something,” I said.

A pause. The kind of pause that told me before he said a word that what was coming was not what I wanted to frear.

“Ms. Kensington,” he said. “I have been working on this for eight months. I have tried every channel available to me—public records, financial databases, social media forensics, and contacts within the legal and corporate system.” He paused again.” Your sister’s private information is untouchable.”

I sat very still.

“Wirat do you mean, untouchable?” I said.

“I mean that every avenue I have pursued has hit a wall,” he said. “Her personal finances prior to I* Technologies are sealed in a way I have never encountered before. Her medical records are untouchable. Her personal history before she came back to New York last year–I cannot find a single usable record. Nothing. It is as though the six years she was away simply do not exist in any searchable form.” He paused. “Whatever Katia Kensington is hiding, she has had very significant help hiding it. The kind of help that costs considerably more than most people have access to. Someone with serious resources has built a wall around her private life, and I cannot get past it.”

I looked at the wall of my wing.

“Keep looking,” I said.

“Ms. Kensington,” he said. “I have to be honest with you. I have reached a dead end. Every direction leads to the same wall. I do not believe continued investigation is going to produce results.” He paused. “I am withdrawing from this ease. I will send my final invoice by the end of the week.”

The line went quiet.

I sat with the phone in my hand long after he had hung up.

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Eight months. Eight months of feeding him information, paying his invoices, and waiting for something I could use, and he was withdrawing because Katia Kensington’s private life was apparently constructed by someone who understood exactly how to make a person invisible when they needed to be.

The kind of help that costs considerably more than most people have access to.

I thought about that.

I thought about Julian and his security team and his four hangars and his shell entities three layers deep and his biometric lock on the study door. I thought about the way Katia’s financial history before I* Technologies did not exist in any searchable form. I thought about the wall I had been hitting for eight months and the wall Victor had been hitting and the wall that seemed to exist around every single piece of Katia’s life before she walked back into Brooklyn last year.

Someone had built that wall.

Someone with the kind of resources that made walls like that possible.

I put the phone down on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

Little Brat

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Hal run out of options from the outside. Every professional avenue irad produced the same result nothing. Whatever Katia was hiding, she had buried it so deep and so carefully that eight months of professional investigation had not produced a single

usable crack.

Which meant if I was going to find anything, it was going to have to come from the inside.

I needed someone who was close to her.

Someone who knew things.

Someone who would not realize they were telling me something useful.

I picked up my bag and my keys.

The Windsor family mansion was forty minutes from Julian’s house.

I had been there enough times to know the gate code and the layout and where Grandma Celeste preferred to spend her mornings. I pulled up at eleven, and a member of staff let me in without question–I was still technically Mrs. Windsor as far as this household was concerned, and nobody had told them otherwise.

I found Aiden in the garden.

He was sitting at the table near the rose beds with his notepad, working on something with the focused, unhurried attention he brought to everything. Grandma was not with him. Gail was not with him. He was alone in the way he was sometimes alone, which was completely self–contained and not lonely at all.

He looked up when I came through the garden door. He looked at me with the clear, assessing eyes that I was beginning to find unsettling in a six–year–old. Then he looked back at his notepad.

“Hi, Aiden,” I said.

He did not answer immediately. He finished the line he was writing. Then he looked up.

“Hi,” he said. The tone of someone who was answering because manners required it and not because they were particularly pleased to.

I sat down across from him.

“I was thinking,” I said. Warm voice. Aunt’s voice. The voice I had prepared on the way down the stairs. “I would like to take you out today. Somewhere fun. Whatever you want to do.”

Aiden looked at me.

He had an expression I could not fully read–not suspicious exactly, not unfriendly exactly. The expression of someone who was looking at a situation and had already formed an opinion about it but was giving it one more second before confirming.

I could tell, from the way he looked at me, that whatever he was about to say I was not going to like.

“I don’t go out with people who fight my mum,” he said.

I blinked.

“Aiden,” I said carefully. “I am your aunt. Your mum is my sister. Sisters fight sometimes. That is just what happens in families.

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“You fight her at every dinner,” Aiden said. He was not being unkind. He was reporting a fact with the precision he brought to all facts. “Every single one. Why is that?”

I opened my mouth.

He was not finished.

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Ace you je dous of my munti?” he asked.

The question landed in the garden and sat there

I felt the heat rise in my face. I swallowed it down. I was not going to lose my composure to a six–year–old in a garden. I was a Kensington. I was composed.

“Of course not,” I said. “I am your aunt, and I warned to spend some time with you. That is all.”

“Why now?” Aiden said.

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