My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 326

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Katia POV

I sat in the car for longer than I meant to.

The engine was off, the driveway stretching out in front of me, the Windsor mansion sitting in the rearview mirror like a question I had just spent the last hour answering, and I stared at the steering wheel and let everything Grandma Celeste had told me rearrange itself inside my chest into something! could actually use.

Twenty-five percent of Windsor Empire Group.

Every property. Every deed. Both names.

A savings account opened seven years ago under the name Kat.

I thought about the version of Julian I had constructed in my head over the past two years, the cold, unknowable man who kept everyone at arm’s length and gave nothing away, who had looked at me across rooms and said less than he meant and more than he admitted, and I tried to square that version against a man who had been quietly putting my name on everything he owned since before I even knew

his.

I couldn’t square it. The two versions of him refused to sit in the same room without fighting each other, and I was tired of trying to make them cooperate.

I thought about the penthouse. My penthouse, the one I had signed for on my own at twenty-two with money I had earned myself, the one I had stood in the middle of the first night and told myself was proof that I needed nothing and nobody, that whatever had happened in Vegas seven years ago with a stranger whose face I couldn’t remember was not something that could define me or diminish what I was building on my own. I had spent four years in that penthouse convincing myself I was independent, untethered, and a woman who had chosen her own life.

And the entire time, my name had been on a mansion I had never once been invited to think of as mine.

I was done being managed. I was done being the last person in every room to know the truth about her own life. If Julian Windsor wanted to play games with information, I could play those games too, and I had spent my entire career learning how to play them better than anyone sitting across from me.

My phone lit up on the passenger seat.

I glanced at it without picking it up, and then I looked again, because the screen had not stopped lighting up the way a phone lit up when one call ended and another started immediately after, the way a man called when he already knew you were not going to pick up and kept going anyway.

I picked it up.

Seven missed calls. All Julian. The most recent one was two minutes ago; the oldest one was timestamped from just under an hour back, which meant he had started calling before I had even made it through the front door of this house, which meant someone had told him I was coming, which meant

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the warning system in this family ran faster and more efficiently than I had given it credit for

I set the phone face down on the passenger seat and looked out the windscreen at the long, empty driveway.

He had the whole year from the moment he knew we were husband and wife to explain to me. He could wait. Whatever urgency he was feeling right now was not my problem to manage, and I was finished managing things that belonged to other people when my own life had been sitting unmanned and unexamined for years while everyone around me knew exactly who I was and said nothing.

I gave myself one more minute. Then I picked the phone back up, scrolled past Julian’s name without stopping, and called Sam.

She picked up on the first ring.

“Where are you?” she said, which told me she already knew something was happening without my having to explain it.

“Outside the Windsor mansion,” I said.

She paused and then spoke. “Are you alright?”

“I need you to do something for me,” I said, skipping past the question entirely. “Call the helpers at the penthouse. Tell them to start packing my clothes. All of them. But I want one suitcase ready for tonight. Just one, just what I need for now. The rest can follow.”

The silence on Sam’s end lasted exactly three seconds, which was three seconds longer than Sam usually needed to process anything.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“I’m going to Julian’s mansion,” I said.

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