My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 240

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Dusi and Pride

~Julian~

I had known for three days.

Sam had not told me -Sam was way too loyal to Katia in a way that rar deeper than employment, and she would not have said à word even if I had asked directly. But I had my own network, and the underground circuit was a world I had been part of for fifteen years, and when a challenge went up under the Catwoman handle after eight months of silence, the notification reached me the same way it reached everyone who had ever raced on that circuit.

I had read the thread.

I had read Tessa’s post.

And I had spent three days telling myself I was not going to be there tonight.

I parked the SUV in the shadow of the old crane structure at the edge of the Brooklyn shipyard at eleven forty–five. The venue was a disused loading dock that the circuit had used four times before–wet concrete, sharp corners, the kind of surface that punished mistakes immediately and without mercy. It had been raining since seven. The tarraac was black and slick, pooled water catching the light from the rigs the circuit crew had set up along the barriers.

There were maybe two hundred people here. That was how these things worked–not the spectacle of the big invitationals, just the people who knew, the people who followed the serious racing, the ones who had come to watch two exceptional drivers find

out what the other was made of.

I stayed in the car.

I was not here. I was not watching. I was sitting in a parked SUV at a disused dock because I had happened to be in the area,

which was a lie I was telling myself with diminishing conviction.

The Porsche arrived first.

Tessa’s GT3–different livery from the heats, a deep red now, the Sterling Motorsports colors stripped, but the preparation obvious. She pulled into the staging area with the smooth, unhurried confidence of a professional who had done this ten thousand times and found the underground circuit mildly entertaining.

She got out. Dark jacket, helmet under her arm, the easy stance of someone who expected to win.

Then the Valkyrie arrived.

Even from where I was parked, I felt it before I heard it—the deep, controlled growl of the Aston Martin engine, the note of a machine that had been tuned to do exactly one thing and do it perfectly. It came in from the east entrance, moving slowly through the crowd, and the crowd parted the way crowds parted for things they respected.

Catwoman got out.

Matte black suit, blacked–out helmet, red visor. The crowd knew the silhouette. I knew it better than anyone.

I gripped the steering wheel.

She walked to the car like she owned the asphalt. She did not look at Tessa. She ran one gloved hand along the bonnet, and it was the same gesture I had watched her use before a race years ago, almost meditative, the way a surgeon settled before an

operation.

My chest was doing something I did not have a name for.

Tessa said something across the staging area. I was too far to hear the words, but I saw the gesture–dismissive, professional, the kind of thing you said to an opponent you had already decided to humiliate.

Catwoman did not respond.

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She got in the car.

The race was four laps of the shipyard circuit `

I watched from the darkness of the SUV with the windows down despite fire cold because I needed to hear it properly

The lights went red.

Then green.

The Valkyrie launched like something that had been holding itself back and had finally decided not to. The acceleration was brutal—the kind of number that did not exist on road cars, the kind that pressed you into the seat and narrowed your vision and made the world outside the cockpit into a blur. Tessa’s GT3 answered it, the Porsche’s’flat–six screaming as she pushed through the first corner, and for half a lap they were together, trading tenths, the circuit loud with two machines running at their absolute limit.

By the second lap, Katia had found her.

I could see it from where I was–the way Catwoman started taking the corners differently, cutting inside where Tessa was leaving a half meter, finding the dry line through the standing water, reading the circuit in real time, and adjusting. Every lap she was a fraction earlier into the braking zone. Every lap she was a fraction later on the throttle. She was not just racing Tessa. She was dismantling her methodically, corner by corner, like she had been studying the GT3’s weaknesses and was now executing on what she had found.

Lap three, turn four.

The hairpin at the far end of the circuit where the concrete curved sharply left and the standing water was deepest. Tessa went in fast–too fast, the kind of fast that was either brilliant or catastrophic with no middle ground. She was on the limit. She had been on the limit for three laps, and she had managed it, and she was managing it again—

Catwoman went inside her.

Not through the normal line. The outside of the inside, a gap that should not have existed, a gap that required absolute precision on wet concrete in a machine making over one thousand horsepower, a gap that I would not have taken at that speed in dry conditions.

She took it.

The Valkyrie moved through like it had been placed there by calculation rather than driven there by a human being.

Tessa’s GT3 caught the standing water on the exit. The back stepped out. She corrected—she was good; she corrected immediately—but the correction was a fraction late, and the car spun, sliding wide across the concrete and into the gravel trap at the outside of the turn, the red livery disappearing in a cloud of dust and wet grit.

The circuit erupted.

Catwoman did not look back.

She completed the final lap cleanly, crossed the line, and drove into the staging area. She got out of the car while Tessa’s crew was still running across the circuit to the gravel trap.

She raised one hand to the crowd.

The crowd answered.

She did not take the helmet off. She walked back to the car, got in, and the Valkyrie moved through the crowd and out the east entrance the same way it had come in.

In forty seconds she was gone.

I sat in the SUV for a while after the Valkyrie’s taillights disappeared.

Dustion

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