My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 365

Thing Means Something

A Date That Means Something

~Julian~

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Marcus called just after seven the next morning, earlier than he usually reached out, which told me before he said

a word that he had found something worth losing sleep over.

“I have the incorporation date,” he said.

“Tell me,” I said, already reaching for a pen.

“Meridian Crest Holdings was registered eleven years ago,” Marcus said. “Offshore, through a firm that specializes in exactly this kind of structure, the sort of company built to obscure ownership from anyone who might come looking later.”

I wrote the date down and stared at it.

Eleven years ago put us well before Katia, well before WEG’s rivalry with any of the companies I had spent the last decade outmaneuvering. Eleven years ago I had been in the early years of running WEG myself, still building the version of the company that would eventually eclipse everything that came before it.

“That predates almost everything I have built,” I said slowly.

“I know,” Marcus said. “I checked the timeline twice before I called you because I did not believe it myself the first time. Whatever this is, Julian, it did not start with anything you have done running WEG. It started with something further back.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, running through everything I could remember from that period of my life, trying to find a single thread that connected to a grievance old enough to have waited eleven years to surface.

“I do not immediately know what was happening in my life then that would explain this,” I said quietly.

Marcus was silent on the other end of the line.

“Then we start broader,” he said finally. “A company built to hide its ownership, incorporated more than a decade ago and left sitting untouched until now. Someone wanted a vehicle ready long before they ever intended to use it. That kind of patience does not come from a business dispute. It comes from something personal.”

“Who would have a grievance against me that old?” I said. “I have made enemies over the years, the way any man in my position makes enemies, but nothing that ever felt personal enough to explain something like this.”

“Perhaps it is not only about you,” Marcus said. “Perhaps it reaches further into the family than either of us has considered. Someone who believed they were owed something and never received it.”

The words settled into me slowly, working their way through everything I thought I understood about my own family, every relative I had spent years dismissing as harmless, distant, irrelevant to the version of my life that actually mattered.

“Zane said something similar,” I said. “That I was not looking hard enough at faintly”

“He may be right,” Marcus said “I am going to start pulling records on anyone with a legitimate grievance against this family from that period forward Distant relatives Anyone who believed they deserved more than what they actually received, from anything, an inheritance, a position, of a share of the business.”

“Do it quietly,” I said. “I do not want whoever this is knowing we have found the thread before we have followed it all the way to the end.”

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“Understood,” Marcus said. “I will have something for you within the week.”

1 ended the call and sat there for a long time, staring at the date written on the paper in front of me, eleven years old and suddenly heavier than any number had any right to be.

I thought about the relatives I had spent years dismissing as harmless, distant, and irrelevant to the version of my life that actually mattered, people whose faces I could barely place and whose grievances, if they had any, I had never once bothered to learn.

Someone might have.

I picked up the phone and called Grandma Celeste, needing a voice that remembered the family in ways I had never taken the time to learn myself.

She answered on the second ring.

“Julian,” she said. “This is early for you.”

“I need to ask you something,” I said. “About the family. I need you to think carefully before you answer.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, longer than the question should have required.

“What is it you need to know,” she said finally, and something in her voice told me she already understood exactly why I was asking.

“There is a company,” I said. “Meridian Crest Holdings. Incorporated eleven years ago. I need to know if that name means anything to you. And I need you to think about anyone in this family who might have believed they were owed something and never received it.”

Grandma Celeste was quiet for a long moment, and I could hear the faint sound of her moving somewhere in the house, a door closing softly, as though she wanted to have this conversation somewhere private.

“That narne does not mean anything to me directly,” she said. “But there have always been undercurrents in this family, Julian, quiet resentments that never surfaced properly because no one ever wanted to be the one who said them out loud. I would need to think carefully before I gave you a name I was not certain of.”

“Who?” I said.

“I do not want to give you a name I am not certain of,” she said. “Guessing wrong could send you looking in the wrong direction entirely, and I do not think either of us can afford that right now.

“Grandma,” I said, my patience thinning. “This is not a small matter. Someone spent years building a case against me. Someone hired a man to impersonate Katia’s husband, threatened her, and threatened Aiden. I need whatever you remember, even if you are not certain.”

She was quiet again, and when she spoke this time, her voice had lost some of its usual composure.

“There is someone,” she said. “Your father’s older brother He believed for years that the company should have gone to him when your father took it over instead, and he believed it again, more bitterly, after your father died and I chose to give everything to you rather than to him. We have not spoken in a long time, Julian There are reasons for that distance I am not ready to explain to you today.”

“What reasons?” I said.

“Not today,” she said, her voice firm in a way that closed the subject entirely “I need you to trust me on this When I have something solid enough to hand you, I will tell you everything Today I can only tell you where to start looking, and I would rather do that properly than hand you a name based on nothing more than an old

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grudge I have never fully understood myself.”

“You will not even give me his name,” I said.

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