My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 306

He is not your husband

Katia

The smell of coffee turned my stomach the moment I stepped into the kitchen, which made no sense at all, since I had been drinking the same brand every morning for the better part of a decade.

I stood at the counter and stared at the machine like it had personally betrayed me, then gave up and poured myself a glass of water instead, holding it against my lips longer than I drank from it, waiting for the wave behind my ribs to settle before it climbed any higher.

This was the third morning in a row.

I told myself it was the flight back from the Maldives. Recycled air, pressurized cabins, and the kind of low-grade nausea that came from sitting in a metal tube for fourteen hours and pretending it was relaxing because the water below happened to be turquoise. I told myself it was the wine at dinner the night before, even though had barely finished half a glass before pushin the rest away, the smell of it suddenly wrong in a way I could not name.

I told myself a lot of things that week, mostly because the alternative explanation was not one I had room to consider with everything else sitting on my desk.

By the time I reached the bathroom and pressed my forehead against the cool tile, my stomach finally settling enough to trust standing upright again, I had already decided this was something I would deal with later. Whatever it was. There was a long list of things I was deciding to deal with later, and I was beginning to suspect the list itself had become a kind of survival strategy, i way of getting through any given morning without collapsing under the weight of everything I refused to look at directly.

I dressed for the office anyway.

Sam was already in my office when I arrived, two folders stacked on the edge of my desk and a third one open in her lap, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair the way they always ended up when she had been staring at something for longer than she meant to.

“You look pale,” she said, glancing up.

“I’m fine,” I said, and sat down before my legs could decide otherwise.

She did not push it, which told me she had something bigger waiting and had already decided to spend her concern elsewhere.

“What did you find out about my supposed husband?” I asked.

Sam closed the folder in her lap slowly, the kind of slow that meant she wanted my full attention before she said she next part out loud.

“For starters,” she said, “it’s exactly what you suspected, He is not your husband.”

I felt something in my chest unclench that I had not realized was clenched at all, a kind of reliet so immediate it almost embarrassed me, given how many other problems were still sitting in the room with us.

“Three years ago,” Sam continued, “Jude Wolfe married a model named Hailey Maddison. In the UK, a public ceremony registered the whole thing. There’s a wedding announcement in three different British outlets if you want to see them. ”

“So he’s still married,” I said

“Legally? As far as I can tell, yes Which means whatever certificate he’s waving around with your name on it, it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. A man can’t legally marry two women, Katia. He’s not your husband. He never was. He’s been playing the part.”

“And that motherfucker has been busy playing husband to me?” I almost laughed, how stupid of me! I should have checked a long time ago.

I sat back in my chair and let that settle, turning it over the way I turned over most problems, looking for the angle that

HE

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explained why a man would walk into my life claiming a marriage that did not exist while still legally bound to a woman in London he had apparently never bothered to divorce.

“So the certificate,” I said, “the one he showed the press, the one that’s apparently sitting in some county registry with my

name on it, is fake.”

“Has to be,” Sam said. “Either it was forged well enough to survive scrutiny, or someone with serious resources made sure nobody looked too closely before he went public.”

“Someone with resources,” I repeated.

“Which brings me to the second thing,” Sam said, setting the folder down entirely now, giving me the full weight of her attention. “How did Jude know about Victor? The fall. Who handed him the footage that let him walk in and play hero for the

cameras.”

I had asked myself that same question more times than I could count since the night Jude appeared on every news channel in t city, footage in hand, clearing my name from a murder I had never committed and turning himself into a headline in the same

breath.

“My bet,” Sam said, “is your sister.”

I did not say anything right away, because some part of me had already arrived at the same conclusion days earlier and had simply been waiting for someone else to say it first, so I would not have to be the one who believed it alone.

“Delia,” I said.

“Think about it,” Sam said. “It wasn’t Victor’s people who put you in that cell. It was Delia who tipped off the police about the rooftop. It was Delia who had access to the building’s security feed through Julian’s old contracts before anyone thought to revoke her clearance. If anyone had the means and the motive to fabricate footage and then hand it to a stranger who happene‹ to need a dramatic entrance, it’s her.”

I let that sit in the room for a long moment, watching it rearrange everything I thought I understood about the past several weeks, Jude’s perfectly timed rescue suddenly looking less like/luck and more like a transaction someone else had orchestrated from the very beginning.

“So Delia builds a fake husband,” I said slowly, “hands him a héro moment, and gets a man in my house who reports back to he on everything I do. A man who isn’t even legally free to marry anyone.”

“That’s my read,” Sam said. “I just don’t know yet who’s paying for it or what she’s getting in return.”

I felt the nausea from earlier try to rise again, faint and distant, but I pushed it down the way I had been pushing down everything else that week, and something else rose in its place instead, something sharper, something that tasted a great deal better than fear.

“Nah, the footage, yes, it can be my dumb little sister. But the rest, she is not that cleves to pull this through.” I leaned in. “Get me Hailey Maddison,” I said.

Sam’s eyebrows lifted. “His actual wife.”

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