My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 319

He never lied

– Delia POV-

The door slammed so hard behind me that the painting in the entryway shuddered on its hook, and I didn’t care, I didn’t care about a single thing in this mansion anymore, not the painting, not the vase on the side table that I picked up and threw against the wall before I’d even taken my heels off, watching it shatter into a hundred pieces across the marble like something inside me finally matched the room.

The crash felt good. I threw the second one too, the smaller one from the console table, and watched the flowers scatter across the floor with the water still dripping off the stems, and I stood there in the wreckage of my own foyer in a dress I’d paid four months of allowance for, and I laughed.

I actually laughed.

Because that was the part nobody in that dining room understood. Katia had stood in the middle of her own penthouse and told me, plainly, in front of our parents, in front of the staff, in front of everyone, that she was sleeping with my husband, and I had stood there and done nothing. Said nothing. I just absorbed it the way I’d absorbed everything else for two years, quiet, composed, the good daughter, the proper wife, the one who never made scenes because scenes weren’t ladylike, scenes weren’t what Windsor wives did.

And the worst part, the part that had been sitting in my chest like a stone the entire drive home, was that some small, pathetic piece of me had still expected him to come home with me tonight.

He hadn’t.

I swept my arm across the console table and sent the rest of it crashing down, the bowl of keys, the little dish Martha had given us as a gift two years ago that I’d never even liked, all of it shattering across the floor in one motion, and I stood there breathing hard in the silence that followed, looking at the wreckage, and laughed again, harder this time, until it didn’t sound like laughing anymore at all.

He told me.

He told me before our agreement, also on our fake wedding day standing in this exact apartment in a suit he’d worn like a costume, that he would never touch me. Not unkindly. Not cruelly. Just flat and final, like a fact he was disclosing out of some twisted sense of fairness, the way you’d warn someone about an allergy before they ate something that might kill them.

“I need you to understand something,” he’d said, loosening his tie while I stood there in my wedding dress feeling something cold settle into my stomach. “This marriage will look exactly like what everyone expects it to look like. I will be polite. I will be generous. I will never raise my voice to you or embarrass you in public. But I will never touch you. Not tonight. Not ever. I need you to decide right now whether you can live inside that arrangement, because I am not going to pretend otherwise once the door closes behind us.”

I had said yes.

God help me, I had said yes because I was young and his name was Windsor, and every woman in my circle had spent a decade telling me I’d won something enormous the day they switched Katia to me, and I told myself two years was enough time to change a man’s mind about anything. I told myself coldness could thaw. I told myself I simply hadn’t found the right angle yet, the right version of myself, soft enough, patient enough, or beautiful enough to finally make him want what every other husband in my life seemed to want without trying.

He wasn’t lying.

That was the thing I kept circling back to, standing in my ruined foyer with glass crunching under my heels. He hadn’t lied to me once in two years. He’d told me the exact shape of what our marriage would be before I ever

signed anything, and I’d walked into it anyway, convinced I could be the exception to a rule he’d stated as plainly as a weather report

And the entire time, he’d been warming someone else’s bed

Not a stranger’s. Not some woman from a business trip I could write off as a moment of weakness. My sister’s, The one person on this earth who had spent her entire life being effortlessly better at everything than me, prettier, sharper, and richer in her own right before she ever needed his name attached to hers, and apparently that included this too. This, the one thing I had actually wanted from him, the one thing he’d told nje flatly I would never have.

I picked up my phone off the floor where it had fallen out of my bag and stared at the cracked screen, his name still sitting in my recent calls from three days ago, a conversation about dinner reservations, logistics, nothing real, nothing that had ever once felt like a marriage

“If you wanted her,” I said out loud, to the empty apartment, to nobody, my voice cracking apart on every word, why did you marry me at all?”

The question sat there in the wreckage with nowhere to go

Because that was the part that actually broke something loose in my chest, more than the affair itself, more than watching my own sister deliver the news like a verdict in front of our entire family. If he’d never wanted to touch a wife, if Katia was the one he actually wanted in his bed, there had been no reason, none, to drag me into a marriage built entirely on a lie he never even bothered to tell. He could have stayed unmarried. He could have waited for her. He could have done a hundred things that didn’t require ruining two years of my life as a placeholder for a woman who hadn’t even wanted him yet.

Unless he had needed exactly that. A wife who wasn’t her. A marriage that looked normal enough from the outside that nobody would ever think to look too closely at where his actual hunger was pointed.

I sat down slowly in the middle of the broken glass, not caring whether it cut through the silk of my dress, and pulled my knees up against my chest the way I used to when I was small and Martha had forgotten, again, to come to one of my recitals.

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