My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 349

No Idea

Julian-

I had spent most of the morning staring at the same three names on the whiteboard in my office, none of them fitting the shape of what I actually needed them to explain.

Delia’s name sat at the top, underlined twice, and I had crossed it out and rewritten it three separate times over the past hour, unable to fully commit to either keeping it there or removing it. She had given Jude the footage; that much I was certain of. Sam’s research had confirmed as much. But the deeper scheme, the identity fraud, the years of planning it must have taken to build Jude’s cover convincingly enough to survive scrutiny, none of that fit a woman who had spent two years failing to notice her fake husband would never be her real husband and did not love her.

Zane knocked once and let himself in without waiting for an answer, the way he always did.

“You look like a man who has been arguing with a whiteboard,” he said, dropping into the chair across from my desk.

“I have been arguing with a whiteboard,” I said. “What do you make of this?”

He looked at the names, then at me.

“You still think it is Delia,” he said.

“I do not think it is Delia,” I said. “I think Delia is involved somewhere near the edges of it. I do not think Delia has the mind for something this coordinated. She gave Jude the footage because it served her own plan to install him as Katia’s rescuer. That does not mean she built the rest of it.”

Zane leaned back, considering this.

“Whoever actually hired him,” he said, “wanted us thinking it was Delia. That is the part that interests me. Everything about the setup, the footage passing through her, the way it all traces back to someone with an obvious motive to hurt Katia, it reads like a person who understood that if anyone started investigating, Delia would be the first name anyone reached for.” He paused. “Whoever this is knows Delia is your wife or rather thinks she is your wife and has no idea she is not. They built the entire frame around that fact.”

“So you think it is deliberate misdirection,” I said.

“I think it is exactly that,” Zane said. “Somebody wanted Delia to look guilty enough that nobody looked past her.”

I sat with that for a moment, turning it over.

“What about Tessa?” I said. “She has spent months trying to find Catwoman. She has motive, resources, and enough obsession to justify almost anything.”

Zane shook his head slowly.

“Tessa is ambitious,” he said. “I will give her that. But this does not feel ambitious. This feels personal. Whoever set this up knows how much you care about Katia, and they built a scheme that would make it look like you were sleeping with both sisters at once, humiliating you publicly through Delia while using Jude to threaten the woman you actually care about. That is not the profile of someone chasing a story. That is the profile of someone who wants you to hurt.”

“Then who?” I said.

Zane looked at me for a long moment, and for the first time since he had walked into my office, I saw something

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like genuine uncertainty cross his face.

“I do not know,” he said. “I have gone through everyone I can think of. Business rivals, old enemies, anyone with a grudge large enough to justify this level of planning. None of it fits cleanly.”

I turned back to the whiteboard; the three names stared back at me, none of them offering anything close to an

answer.

“I have no idea,” I said quietly, more to myself than to him.

Zane stood up and walked over to the whiteboard, studying it the way he studied a set of financial reports before a board meeting, looking for the number that did not fit the rest.

“You are missing something,” he said.

“I am aware I am missing something,” I said. “That is why we are having this conversation.”

“No,” Zane said, “I mean you are missing a name. Someone from before Katia. Before Delia. Someone from earlier in your life who might have a reason to want you exposed, humiliated, or hurt through the women closest to you.”

I looked at him.

“I have already gone through every rival I have,” I said. “Every man who has ever tried to undercut a deal, every competitor who lost a contract to WEG in the past decade. None of them fit. This is not about business.”

“That is my point,” Zane said. “You are looking at business enemies. What if this is not a business enemy at all? What if it is family?”

The word landed heavier than I expected.

“My family does not have enemies,” I said. “My family has never needed enemies. We have always been the ones other people were afraid of.”

“Every family has someone,” Zane said. “A cousin passed over. An uncle who resents the way the money was divided. Someone who watched you inherit everything they believed should have gone to them instead.”

I thought about that for a long moment, running through every relative I could name, every distant branch of the Windsor family tree I had spent my entire adult life ignoring because none of them had ever mattered enough to warrant my attention.

Nothing surfaced.

“I cannot think of anyone,” I said. “Nobody in this family has ever shown me anything but loyalty.”

“Then perhaps you are not looking hard enough,” Zane said. “Or perhaps whoever this is has spent years making very sure you never had a reason to look at them at all.”

I did not have an answer for that either.

Zane left a few minutes later, promising to keep digging through what few financial trails Jude’s payments had left behind, and I sat alone in my office long after he was gone, staring at the whiteboard, at the three crossed–out names, and at the empty space beneath them where the real answer was supposed to be written and was not.

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Oppa

Julian-

Aiden climbed onto the couch beside me early Saturday morning, still in his pajamas, his hair sticking up in three different directions, one sock on and one sock noticeably missing.

“Can we go out today?” he asked. “Like a family. A family date.”

I smiled, setting down the paper had not actually been reading, giving him my full attention the way he always demanded without ever quite having to ask for it. There was something in the way he climbed onto furniture, feet first and turning around only once he was already settled, that reminded me of myself at that age, though I doubted he would believe me if I told him that.

“I know Mommy is mad at you,” Aiden continued, entirely unbothered by his own bluntness, the way only a child could deliver a devastating truth over a bowl of cereal he had not even started eating yet. “That is why you are sleeping on the couch. But we could go on a family vacation. And maybe she will forgive whatever you did.”

I looked at my son for a long moment, struck, not for the first time, by how strategic he could be for someone who still needed help tying his shoes most mornings.

“Where do you think we should go?” I asked, curious to see where this negotiation was headed.

Aiden’s face lit up immediately, as though he had been waiting his entire short life for exactly this question. “How about exploring South Korea?” he said, with the confidence of a boy who had clearly been thinking about this answer for longer than the conversation had actually been happening.

“Does your mom love South Korea?” I asked, genuinely curious, running through everything I knew about Katia’s interests and coming up with nothing that pointed anywhere near this country.

“Dad,” Aiden said, with the kind of exasperation only a child could summon for an adult who had clearly missed something obvious, “you have no idea. At some point I thought she might marry someone called Oppa.”

“Who is Oppa?” I asked.

Aiden looked at me the way he looked at his teacher when she asked the class an easy question nobody had gotten wrong before him, the expression of a child mildly disappointed in the adult standing in front of him.

“Dad, you are way too behind,” he said, shaking his head slowly, as though the gap in my education pained him personally. “Mom loves Koreans. Their movies. She is so obsessed with all these oppas who are way more handsome than you.”

“Show me,” I said.

“Dad, don’t even try it,” Aiden said, shaking his head with the seriousness of a much older person delivering unwelcome news. “Because you are not like them. They are very handsome. If you see them, you might even cancel this trip to South Korea out of jealousy.”

“Jealousy,” I said.

Aiden nodded, satisfied that he had made his point, and slid off the couch to go find his breakfast.

I sat there for a moment after he left, listening to the sound of cabinets opening and closing in the kitchen down the hall and the familiar clatter of a cereal bowl being set on the counter with more force than necessary. I thought about the version of myself 1 had been six months ago, a man who would have found the idea of losing an argument to a child about handsome Korean actors almost insulting. That version of me would have dismissed the

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entire conversation within thirty seconds and gone back to whatever he considered actually important that morning.

I did not feel that way anymore.

I pulled out my phone and typed South Korea into the search bar, scrolling through images of Seoul at night, the skyline lit in a way that reminded me faintly of Manhattan but softer somehow, less aggressive about announcing its ownwealth. I thought about Katia, about whether Aiden’s assessment of her interests carried any truth to it, and found myself smiling at the idea of her sitting somewhere watching a show with subtitles, invested in the fate of a fictional man named something I would never be able to pronounce correctly on the first attempt.

I had spent two years assuming I understood every version of Katia Kensington there was to understand. The version who ran I* Technologies with a precision that made grown executives nervous. The version who drove through underground circuits at speeds that should have terrified her and clearly did not. The version who had built an entire company from nothing while raising a son alone, carrying secrets I had only recently begun to understand the weight of.

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