My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 226

Did you wins.

Did you win?

-Katia

I wore the grey suit.

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Not because it was a power suit or because Thad thought about what message it sent. I wore it because it was the first thing I reached for that morning, and I had stopped overthinking my wardrobe six months ago when I realized that the kind of woman who spent forty minutes deciding what to wear to destroy someone in court was not the kind of woman I wanted to be.

Sam was already in the lobby when I came down.

She handed me coffee without being asked. We did not speak on the drive over. There was nothing to say that had not already been said in the months of preparation that had led to this morning–the counter–filing, the fraud complaint, and the evidence that Marcus had assembled like a man who genuinely enjoyed being right.

The courthouse was cold the way courthouses always were. That institutional cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the weight of what happened inside them.

Victor was already there.

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I saw him across the lobby. He was in a suit that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, and he was standing with his legal team looking like a man who had done this before and expected to do it again. Confident. That was the word. The kind of confidence that came from years of walking into rooms and having them rearrange themselves around you.

He saw me and smiled, but I looked away.

Marcus had been building this case for eight months.

The judge was a woman in her late fifties with the expression of someone who had heard every version of every story and was not going to be impressed by any of them. She called the room to order at nine fifteen, and the thing began.

Victor’s attorney opened first. Forty minutes of carefully constructed narrative–the IP, the startup, the years of development, and the acquisition that had taken what rightfully belonged to his client. He was good. I will give him that. He had a voice that made things sound reasonable even when they were not, and he used it well.

Then Marcus stood up.

Marcus did not have a voice like that. Marcus had something better. He had the documents.

The dissolved startup. Filed fourteen months before my acquisition of Meridian. A government regulatory filing showing the IP transferred out of Victor’s entity–transferred, not stolen; transferred by Victor himself as part of a compliance obligation fourteen months before I ever touched the company.

The timestamp discrepancy. The fabricated evidence. The document that Victor’s team had submitted as proof of ownership that had been created after the fact and Marcus had the metadata to prove it, the forensic analysis, and the chain of custody showing exactly when the file had been made and how it differed from the date it claimed to carry.

The room had a quality to it when truth landed that way. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just the quiet of a space where something had been decided and everyone in it understood that the deciding had happened.

Victor’s attorney asked for a recess.

The judge denied it.

By noon it was over.

The IP claim was thrown out. Entirely. The judge did not mince words: fabricated evidence, fraudulent filing, and a deliberate attempt to damage a competitor through the court system. She used the word “deliberate” three times. She looked at Victor when she said it.

Did you w

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Victor did not look back at her.

The criminal fraud referral was filed before the afternoon session began. I sat in the gallery and watched Victor Hale, ex–MI6 and CEO of Halo Systems, the man who had spent eighteen months trying to dismantle everything I built, sit at his table while his attorney leaned over and spoke quietly into his ear, and whatever the attorney said did not make Victor’s expression change at all.

He just sat there.

Marcus came and sat beside me during the break.

“It’s done,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“The criminal charges will take longer,” he said. “But the civil case is finished. He has nothing left to come at you with on this front.‘

I nodded.

I looked across the courtroom at Victor.

He was still sitting very still. And then, as if he felt my eyes on him, he turned. He looked at me across the courtroom with the dark, wired gaze that I had seen across boardroom tables and dinner tables and in the lobby of a hotel in Dubai. The look of a man who had built something and was watching it come apart and was already, somewhere behind his eyes, calculating what

came next.

I held his gaze. I did not look away first; he did.

Outside the courthouse, the afternoon had turned grey. Sam was on her phone already, fielding the calls that had started coming in the moment the ruling was public. The press was at the bottom of the steps–not many, but enough. A camera or two. A journalist I recognized from the financial desk of a publication that had run Victor’s planted article six months ago.

I walked past all of it.

Sam fell into step beside me.

“Government contract committee has already been in touch,” she said. “They want a meeting. Next week.”

“Book it,” I said.

“Julian’s office called,” she said. “Reid says Julian was watching the livestream. He wants to know if you are coming to the mansion tonight.”

I thought about that for a moment.

“Tell Reid I will call him,” I said.

Sam looked at me sideways.

“You are going,” she said. It was not a question.

“Sam,” I said.

“I’m just saying,” she said. “You won today. You are allowed to go somewhere that feels good.”

I did not answer that.

We got in the car.

I looked out the window at the city moving past. At the courthouse, getting smaller in the side mirror. At the grey afternoon that did not know or care that something had ended today–eighteen months of Victor Hale and his fabricated evidence and his

Did you wing

planted articles and his war against something I had built from nothing–ended in a courtroom at noon on a Tuesday.

I thought about Aiden. About whether he was at the estate or the penthouse. About whether he had eaten lunch.

I picked up my phone. I did not call Julian. I called Aiden.

He answered on the second ring

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