My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 35

Where is your ring

Katia’s POV

The lobby of the Windsor Empire Group was a temple of glass and brushed steel, a monument to the cold efficiency Julian Windsor demanded from the world. Usually, walking into a high–stakes meeting felt like stepping onto a battlefield where I held all the best weapons. But today, my grip on my briefcase felt loose. My skin felt too thin.

“Remember,” Samantha whispered as the elevator surged toward the executive floor, “eyes on the data, not the man. You’re the CEO of I* Technologies. You’re here to prove our integration is seamless, not to answer for a jazz club in Antibes.”

“I know how to do my job, Sam,” I replied, though my voice sounded hollow even to my own ears. I glanced down at my hands. They were bare, my fingers looking pale and vulnerable against the black leather of my bag. I had left the ring in my jewelry box at the loft. I couldn’t risk it, not here. That ring cost a lot, so showcasing it would be a death wish.

The elevator doors slid open.

The conference room was already half–full. Julian’s top executives were lined up like soldiers, their tablets glowing in the dim light. As I walked in, a heavy, suffocating silence fell over the room. It wasn’t the usual silence of respect; it was the silence of people who had spent their morning staring at a phone screen, comparing the knuckles of the woman in a photo to the woman walking through the door.

Nobody said a word. But their eyes trailed my movements, settling on my hands as I set my laptop on the long, polished glass

table.

I took my seat, looking straight ahead. A few minutes later, the double doors at the end of the room opened, and Julian walked in.

He looked impeccable. His suit was a dark charcoal grey that made him look like a shadow cast against the bright Manhattan morning. He didn’t look tired. He didn’t look like a man who had been caught in a scandal. He walked to the head of the table, his presence commanding the oxygen in the room.

His gaze swept over the board, settling on me last. For a heartbeat, the professional mask slipped. His eyes dropped to my hands resting on the glass. The table was so clear, so reflective, that every detail was magnified. He saw the stillness of my fingers. He knew I knew.

“Let’s begin,” Julian said, his voice a low, steady vibration that seemed to settle in the small of my back.

The audit was grueling. For three hours, his team grilled Samantha and me on server latency, encryption handshakes, and the scalability of our Al models. Julian was uncharacteristically quiet, his eyes fixed on the projected data, but I could feel his attention on me like a physical weight.

Whenever I spoke, the room seemed to hold its breath. One of the senior directors, a man named Miller who had been with the Windsors for thirty years, kept glancing between me and his phone under the table. He opened his mouth as if to ask something personal, but Julian’s head snapped toward him; it was a predatory warning in his eyes that made Miller choke back his words and return to the spreadsheet.

When the meeting was finally adjourned, the room emptied with frantic haste. Samantha gave my shoulder a supportive squeeze before following the other executives out, leaving me alone with him.

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