My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 228

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The Fall

-Victor

The call came at two in the afternoon.

I was still in the courthouse lobby when my phone rang. I had watched the ruling happen. I had sat at that table and listened to the judge use the word “fabricated” four times, and I had kept my face completely still because I had spent fifteen years in rooms where keeping your face still was the difference between walking out and being carried out.

I walked out.

My phone rang before I reached the pavement.

It was Gerald, chairman of the Halo Systems board. Gerald, who had shaken my hand at every quarterly meeting for six years and told me I was the best CEO the company had ever had.

“Victor,” he said.

One word. My name. Said in the tone that men like Gerald used when a decision had already been made and the call was a formality.

“Gerald,” I said.

“The board met this morning,” he said. “Before the ruling. We had already seen enough.” A pause. “We are asking for your resignation. Effective immediately.‘

I stopped walking.

“1

The pavement was cold under my feet. People moved around me: the lunchtime crowd, the courthouse regulars, and and a journalist I recognized from the financial press who was already on his phone, already talking, already writing the story that was going to be everywhere by six o’clock.

“You will have it,” I said.

I hung up.

By four o’clock my investors had started pulling out.

Not all of them. The smaller ones held, the ones who owed me favors, the ones whose own situations were complicated enough that they could not afford to be seen abandoning ship too quickly. But the three largest funds, the ones whose names on my

r portfolio had given Halo Systems its credibility, called within ninety minutes of each other and said variations of the same thing.

They were reassessing their position.

That was the language they used. Reassessing. As though what had happened in that courtroom was a market fluctuation rather than a judge using the word “fabricated” four times while looking at me.

I sat in my office–my former office, I supposed, though nobody had come to collect my access card yet and I looked at the city through the floor–to–ceiling windows, and I thought about eighteen months of work. Eighteen months of building a case against Katia Kensington and her company. Eighteen months of planting articles and filing lawsuits and feeding information through Delia and running Daniel Osei as an asset inside I* Technologies.

Daniel Osei.

The thought arrived and sat heavily.

I picked up my phone and called my intelligence contact–the man who handled the information side of things, who had been managing Daniel for the past year.

He answered on the first ring.

The Fall

“Daniel,”

“I said. “Where is tre?”

A pause that told me everything, before the word’s arrived.

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the Middle

“Daniel has not been responding to contact for three weeks,” ray contact said carefully. “The last data he sent us East misdirection and the false partnership leads- I ran verification on it yesterday after the ruling.” Another pause. “Victor. The data was fabricated. All of it. Everything Daniel sent us in the last six months has been false.”

I set the phone down on the desk without ending the call.

Six months.

Daniel Osei had been feeding me false information for six months. Which meant that everything Thad built my strategy on the

was invented. I had been making Middle East angle, the partnership leads, the intelligence about I*‘s vulnerabilities

decisions based on data that had been constructed for me. I had been steered. Played. By an asset I thought I owfred.

Katia Kensington had turned my man.

She had turned him and pointed him back at me and let me run for six months on lies while she built the counter–filing that had just destroyed my company in open court.

I looked at the city through the window.

The government contract.

I picked up my phone again and called Sir Edmund’s office. The committee chair. The man I had been cultivating for two years, the connection I had been counting on to deliver the contract that would have made everything else irrelevant.

His assistant answered.

Sir Edmund was unavailable.

I asked when he would be available.

The assistant said she would pass on the message.

She did not sound like she was going to pass on the message.

I put the phone down.

I knew what unavailable meant. It meant the committee had already made their decision. It meant that the government contract, the contract that Halo Systems had been positioned to win for eighteen months, was going elsewhere. It was going to I * Technologies. To Katia. To the woman who had just watched me be escorted from relevance in a courtroom and had walked out into the grey afternoon without looking back.

I sat in my office until six.

Nobody came to take my access card. Nobody sent security. Nobody made a scene. The board had been too civilized for that. They had simply called Gerald, and Gerald had called me, and the whole thing had happened in the quiet, bloodless way that the most brutal things often happen–without drama, without witnesses, without anything that could be photographed or quoted.

At six fifteen I stood up.

I looked around the office. Six years of my life in this room. The view I had chosen when I took the job. The desk I had had shipped from Milan. The cabinet in the corner that held fifteen years of intelligence work, contacts, favors owed, and information gathered.

I opened the cabinet.

I took out the files that were mine personally–not Halo’s, mine. The ones that existed outside of any company structure. I put them in my bag.

The Foll

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Hatt everything else.

I walked to fire elevator and rode it down to the lobby, walked through the lobby and out through the front doors and into the New York evening, and did not look back at the building.

I called Delia from the car.

She did not answer. I called again.

She did not answer again.

I put the phone on the seat beside me and drove and thought about what came next. Not in the way I usually thought about what came next–not with the forward momentum of a man building toward something. Just the flat, crear–eyed accounting of a man who had lost a battle and needed to understand exactly how badly before he could decide what to do about it.

The IP lawsuit was finished. The criminal fraud charges would take time, but they would come, and when they came, they would be serious. My investors were gone. My board had asked for my resignation. The government contract was lost. Daniel Osei had been working against me for six months, and I had not seen it.

Katia Kensington was good; I had to give it to her.

I drove to my penthouse.

I poured a drink.

I sat at the window and looked at the city and drank it slowly and thought about Julian Windsor.

was Julian Windsor. The man Because at the end of it- underneath the lawsuit and the board and the investors and Daniel who had built a wall around Katia Kensington’s entire private life so thoroughly that eight months of professional investigation had found nothing. The man whose security team had turned my asset without me knowing. The man who had been in that courtroom today watching even when he wasn’t around while his lawyers dismantled everything I had spent eighteen months building.

I had gone after the wrong target.

I had spent eighteen months trying to destroy Katia Kensington, and I had not understood until this moment, sitting alone in a penthouse that suddenly felt very empty, that Katia Kensington was not the target.

Julian Windsor was.

I finished my drink.

I set the glass down.

New York blazed outside the window, indifferent and relentless, the way it always was.

I started thinking.