My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 316

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The Imposter

Katia

The crash of the wine glass still hung in the air when Delia reappeared in the doorway, her face streaked and furious, apparently unwilling to let the rest of us finish destroying her reputation without her standing there to hear every word of it.

“I’m not done,” she said, her voice raw. “You don’t get to say all of that and then let me walk out while everyone just stands here agreeing with you.”

“Nobody’s agreeing with anything,” I said. “We’re simply waiting to see if you’ll finally tell the truth.”

Jude seized the moment, stepping forward with both hands raised slightly, the posture of a man trying to physically calm a room he had lost control of several minutes ago.

“I think,” he said, “we should all take a breath. This has clearly become about old wounds between sisters, and I don’t think any of us benefit from-”

“Don’t,” I said, and turned the full weight of my attention onto him for the first time in several minutes.” Don’t you dare try to use Delia’s pain as a shield for yourself right now.”

“I’m simply trying to de-escalate-”

“You’re trying to disappear into the background before anyone asks you a question you can’t answer,” I said. “So let’s ask it now, while everyone’s still in the room. How did you know about Victor Hale’s fall?”

The room shifted again, something in the air changing entirely, Jude’s careful composure cracking visibly for the first time since dinner began.

“I told you already,” he said. “I had contacts who fed me the footage. It’s how I cleared your name.”

“Whose contacts?” I said.

“I don’t reveal sources,” he said, and the line came out far too smooth, far too rehearsed, the kind of answer a man gave when he had practiced it in a mirror.

“Convenient,” I said. “Because I had Sam pull the access logs on that footage this week. Do you know what she found, Jude? The original file was only ever accessed by two people before it reached you. Security, and one member of this family who still had clearance to that building’s system from when she lived there as Julian’s wife.”

Martha’s hand drifted up to her mouth.

David set down a glass he had only just picked back up.

“Delia,” I said, turning to my sister, “handed you that footage. Didn’t she.

“That’s not true,” Jude said quickly, too quickly, his eyes flicking toward Delia for half a second before he caught himself.

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“I didn’t ask you,” I said. “I asked her.”

Delia’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“You staged it,” I said, looking between the two of them now, watching the pieces finally lock into place. out loud, in front of everyone, exactly the way Sam and I had assembled them across her desk that morning. “She gave you the footage. You used it to walk in and play hero, clear my name, and earn yourself a place in this family you had absolutely no legitimate claim to. The two of you built an entire rescue out of evidence she had no right giving you.”

“Why?” Martha said, her voice barely above a whisper, looking at her eldest daughter now with something close to horror. “Why would you do that, Delia? Why would you hand a stranger evidence about your own sister’s case?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Delia said, the words coming apart even as she said them.

“Then tell us what it was like,” I said. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks exactly like a woman so desperate to punish her sister that she handed a con artist the tools to walk into this family and steal her place at the table.”

“I didn’t know what he was going to do with it,” Delia said, her voice shaking badly now. “I gave it to him because he asked, because he said it would help. I didn’t think-”

“You didn’t think,” I repeated. “You didn’t think a man you barely knew, asking for confidential evidence in a murder case involving your own sister, might have something other than good intentions.”

“Enough,” Jude said, his voice sharper now, an edge of real panic finally bleeding through the charm. ” This is exactly what I told you would happen, Delia. The moment any of this came out, she’d twist it to make you the villain instead of looking at her own behavior.”

“My behavior,” I said, turning on him fully now, “is asking the man who has been sleeping in my parents’ good graces for months, accepting their gifts, kissing their cheeks, and calling himself family exactly how he came to know about a crime scene he had no business knowing about. That’s not twisting anything, Jude. That’s simply asking the question you’ve spent this entire dinner trying very hard not to answer.”

“I answered it,” he said. “I told you. Contacts.”

“Try again,” I said. “Because I don’t think you understand yet exactly how much trouble you’re actually in tonight.”

“Are you threatening me?” Jude said, straightening, trying to summon back whatever swagger he had walked in with hours ago.

“I’m informing you,” I said. “There’s a difference. A threat is something I might do later. This is simply telling you what’s already in motion. Obtaining confidential evidence connected to an active investigation, through a private contact with no legal authority to share it, is not a gray area, Jude. It’s a crime. And right now there are exactly two people in this room who could be charged for it.

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Delia made a small, broken sound.

“You wouldn’t,” she said.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, which was not entirely true, but I wanted her to sit with the uncertainty a moment longer before I told her anything else. “What I have decided is that I’m done letting either of you stand in my home pretending this was anything other than calculated.”

“It wasn’t calculated,” Delia said. “I was angry. I wanted you to suffer the way I felt like I was suffering. I didn’t think it through past that.”

“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said all night,” I said.

Martha had gone entirely silent, her hand pressed flat against her chest, watching her daughter unravel in real time with an expression that looked, for the first time all evening, genuinely shattered rather than merely inconvenienced.

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Hailey

~Katia POV~

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She was beautiful in the kind of effortless way that made the whole room feel slightly underdressed, dark hair pulled back from a face that hadn’t bothered with much makeup, like she’d left wherever she’d been living in a hurry and hadn’t stopped to care how she looked doing it.

She stood in the doorway for exactly one second, taking in the table, the wreckage of dinner, the wine stain still drying on the marble where Delia had shattered her glass an hour earlier, and then her eyes found Jude and stopped moving entirely.

“You,” she said.

One word. It landed harder than anything I’d said all night.

“Hailey.” Jude’s voice came out wrong, too high, nothing left of the smooth charm he’d walked in wearing three hours ago. “What are you doing here. How did you even-”

“How did I get here?” Her laugh had no humor in it at all. “A very polite woman called me this morning and told me my husband was about to be exposed as a liar at a family dinner in another country and asked if I wanted a flight.” She looked around the table slowly, taking in Martha’s stricken face, David braced against the bar cart, and Delia frozen by the doorway. “I should have asked for first class. I would have liked a drink before this.”

“Sit down, Hailey, please; you don’t understand the situation-”

“Oh, I understand it perfectly.” She crossed the room toward him, and he actually flinched, an honest-to- God flinch, the first one I’d seen out of him all night. “I understand that my husband has been gone for months, telling me it was business. Motorsport sponsorship deals. Investor meetings. I understand have been sitting in our flat in London wondering why you stopped calling back, and the entire time vou were here, playing house, wearing a wedding ring that isn’t even mine

“Wedding ring,” Martha repeated faintly, like the words didn’t fit together in her mouth

“His,” Hailey said, not even looking at her “He’s still wearing it Look at his hand I thought he removed it

for a new one ”

Every eye at the table went to Jude’s left hand at once, and for the first time all o

actually try to hide something physically, curling his fingers into his palm like that y band of gold disappear

This is not what it looks like he wand

watched homm

ake the the

it is exactly what it looks like I said You’ve spent months telling my city you were the man married in Vegas, all while wearing the ning your as tual wife gave you and you didn’t even have the decency to take

#t off

That’s not a explam

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“Explain what,” Hailey said, rounding on him now, all the careful poise from the doorway burning away into something raw. “Explain why you took a job that meant pretending to be married to another woman? Explain why you let me think you were drowning in spreadsheets while you were sitting at someone else’s dinner table calling her sweetheart?” Her voice cracked. “Explain why, when I called the company looking for you, three different people told me Jude Wolfe doesn’t currently have any sponsorship meetings scheduled?”

“It’s complicated,” Jude said.

“It is the least complicated thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Hailey said. “You sold yourself to someone I don’t know who. I don’t know why. But you sold yourself, and you didn’t even tell your own wife you were doing it.”

David’s hand had gone very still on the bar cart.

“Sold himself,” he repeated. “To who?”

“I told you, I don’t know,” Hailey said, and something in the way she said it, flat and tired, told me she d already asked herself that question a hundred times on the flight over and arrived nowhere useful. He stopped telling me things months ago. Before that, even. I used to know every name on his calendar Then one day I didn’t, and I told myself that was normal, that men got busy, that marriages went quiet

sometimes and came back around if you were patient enough.”

“And now,” I said.

“Now I know exactly how patient I was for,” she said. “Months. While he sat at a different table calling

another woman his wife.”

Hailey turned, finally, toward the rest of the table, like she was only now remembering there were other people in the room who deserved an answer too.

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