My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 285

Who Is Upstairs

-Delia-

Three days.

It had been three fucking days since Katia walked through the front doors of this house, and I had not seen her walk back out.

I had been counting

The first day I had told myself it was nothing. Katia had come on Julian’s call-the so-called London Extension, the business emergency that required her to drive to the city mansion at nine o’clock at night – and maybe she had stayed in one of the guest rooms. It was a large house. There were plenty of rooms. It did not have to mean anything.

The second day the trays started.

One of the housemaids carried a breakfast tray upstairs at eight in the morning and came back with it empty. Lunch tray at noon. Empty. Dinner tray at seven. Empty. Two trays. Side by side on the trolley when they went up. Two sets of cutlery. Two glasses.

I had watched from the corridor. I had counted the cutlery.

Two, fucking two!

Julian had not left his wing. Not once in three days. His meetings had been rescheduled – I knew this because I had seen the calendar notifications on the shared household system before his assistant locked me out of it on the second day. His calls were being handled remotely. His security team rotated at the door of the east wing like the professional thoroughness of people who had been told nobody was to disturb the occupant.

Nobody. Singular, or occupant; plural.

The housemaids did not look at me when I asked them questions. They answered with the minimal words their loyalty allowed, and then they moved away quickly. The security team at the east wing door looked straight through me when I appeared in the corridor.

On the third morning I stood at the window of my wing and looked at the private garage.

Julian’s car was there.

My car was there.

And there was a third car. A grey Aston Martin that I had seen before-not often, not in a context I had catalogued carefully enough, but somewhere. A car that belonged to someone who had arrived three nights ago and had not left.

I sat on the edge of my bed and thought about that car for a very long time.

Jude Wolfe was in New York claiming to be Katia’s husband. If Jude was her husband real or fabricated and the world had accepted the narrative, then Katia’s situation was complicated. Katia had her own domestic chaos to manage

But Katia had driven to this house three nights ago and had not come out.

And there were two trays going upstairs every meal

I got dressed.

I drove to 1* Technologies.

The I* Technologies building in Brooklyn was a glass and steel structure that announced itself from two blocks away I had been inside it before – once for a corporate event and mostly because I had been trying to find information and had misjudged how well the reception team knew exactly who was and was not welcome

I walked past reception without stopping

The lift to the executive floor opened with a quiet hiss. I walked down the corridor. I had memorized the layout from my previous visits. Third door on the left. The one with the nameplate that said & Kensington, CEO.

I pushed the door open. The room was not empty. It was not even close to empty.

There was a long oval table with twelve people seated around it — laptops, documents, coffee cups, and the concentrated energy of a meeting that had been in progress for some time. At the head of the table, standing with a laser pointer in her hand and a slide projected on the wall behind her, was Katia.

Every head at the table turned toward the door.

Katia turned last.

She looked at me with the cool, unhurried expression of a woman who had been interrupted before and had learned to manage it without letting it show on her face. Her cheek still carried the faint, yellowing edge of a bruise I saw her with some days ago. Her lip had healed to a thin line.

She was standing.

She was in the office.

Katia had been here

Which meant the person upstairs in Julian’s east wing was not Katia

Then who was it?

I walked back to the lift. I pressed the button stood in the mirrored box as it descended and looked at my own reflection and thought about a grey Aston Martin in the private garage and two trays going upstairs three times a day and Julian not leaving his wing for seventy-two hours.

The lift opened.

I walked through the lobby.

I walked to my car and sat in it without starting the engine.

The question was sitting in my chest like a stone, and it was not moving, and I did not have an answer for it, and every direction I tried to think in led back to the same impossibility

If it was not Katia upstairs with Julian, then it was someone else. Someone he cared enough about to stay in his wing for three days without leaving Someone whose meals he was sharing. Someone whose car he had let into the private garage.

I started the engine.

I drove back to the mansion.

I was going to find out who was in that room. One way or another.

I had been patient for almost two years. I had been ignored and locked out and walked past and dismissed, and I had swallowed every single piece of it because I had told myself patience was a strategy.

Patience was over.

One way or another I was going to find out what was happening in that east wing. And when I found out, I was going to decide what to do with it.

I pressed my foot on the accelerator and drove.