My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 310

You Just Want My Husband

Katia

The room had gone so quiet I could hear the ice shifting in David’s glass, the small clink of it the only sound moving through space that had, only minutes earlier, been full of laughter and the easy clatter of a family pretending to enjoy itself.

“Excuse me,” I said, turning to face my sister fully

“You heard me,” Delia said, lifting her chin, color rising along her throat in a way that fold me she had not actually thought th sentence through before she said it, only reached for the sharpest thing within arm’s reach and thrown it. “All of this. The accusations, the timing, doing it tonight, in front of everyone. Maybe you’re not actually upset about Jude at all. Maybe you’re upset because you want something you can’t have.”

“And what is that, exactly?” I asked.

Delia’s eyes flicked, just briefly, toward Julian, who had not moved from his place near the window since this entire conversation began, watching the unfolding scene with the same flat composure he wore into every room that threatened to a something of him he was not prepared to give freely.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Delia said.

“I genuinely don’t,” I said, though we both knew that was not entirely true. “Why don’t you say it plainly instead of dressing it up as a question. You think I want Julian.”

The room shifted again, the air pulling tight around us, Martha’s hand frozen against her pearls, David setting his glass down entirely now, no longer pretending he had anywhere else to look.

“Don’t you?” Delia said.

I let the question sit for a moment, watching my sister’s face, the careful mask she had been wearing all evening already cracking at the edges, the same crack I had been watching grow since the night of the boxes, since Julian told her family he had never once brought them a gift and she had been forced to sit there and absorb exactly what that silence had been saying about

her marriage for two years.

“Let me ask you something instead,” I said. “Is Julian your husband, Delia? Or do you just like the idea of being Mrs. Windsor?”

The question landed harder than I expected it to, even from my own mouth.

Delia’s lips parted slightly, no sound coming out for a moment, her eyes darting toward Julian and then quickly away again, as though she could not afford to look at him directly while she figured out how to answer.

“That is an insane thing to ask,” she said finally.

“Is it?” I said. “Because from where I’m standing, you’ve spent two years married to a man who has never once given you a single thing beyond his name, and you have never once asked yourself why. You sit at every dinner, every gala, every tamily gathering, wearing that name like it means something, and the moment I ask you a direct question about what it actually means, you can’t answer it.”

“I don’t have to justify my marriage to you,” Delia said, her voice climbing now, something brittle running underneath it.

“No,” I agreed. “You don’t. But you don’t get to stand in my home and accuse me of wanting your husband while you can’t even tell this room whether you actually have one ”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it,” I said. “Tell me, Delia. When was the last time Julian touched you? Not performed for a room. Touched you the way a husband touches a wife he actually wants in his bed. Actually, let me rephrase my question: Has your husband ever touched you in these 2 years of marriage?”

The silence that followed was its own kind of answer.

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Martha’s hand had drifted fully away from her pearls now, pressed flat against her own chest instead, her eyes moving rapidly between her two daughters as though watching an accident unfold in slow motion that she had no ability to stop.

“Katia,” she said, “that’s enough.”

“It’s not nearly enough,” I said, though I kept my eyes on Delia. “Because here is the part nobody in this family wants to look at directly. You married a man for his name and his money, the same way half the women in your social circle do, and that would have been fine, that would have been your business entirely, if you hadn’t spent the last two years pretending it was something it never was. A real marriage. A love story. The kind of thing you have to lecture me about wanting when you’ve never had it yourself.”

“You don’t know anything about my marriage,” Delia said, her voice shaking now, the brittle thing underneath it finally breaking through.

“I know enough,” I said. “I know enough to ask you a very simple question, Delia, and I would like an answer this time instead of a deflection. If I told this entire table that I am sleeping with your husband, would that be considered cheating?”

The question dropped into the room like something physical, a weight settling over every person standing in it. David’s face had gone entirely white. Martha’s mouth opened and closed without producing a single word. Jude, who had been silent for several minutes now, watching the exchange between the sisters with an expression caught somewhere between confusion and dawning alarm, took a half step forward as though he meant to intervene and then thought better of it.

Delia stared at me, her jaw working silently, the muscle there tightening and releasing the same way it had at the dinner table the night Julian told everyone he had never bought a single gift in two years.

She did not answer.

The silence stretched long enough that it became its own kind of confession, long enough that I watched the color drain entirely from my little sister’s face, leaving her standing in the middle of my living room looking like a woman who had just realized the floor beneath her had never actually been solid at all.