My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 367

Confirmation

~Grandma Celeste~

The call came three days later, late in the evening, exactly when I had stopped expecting to hear from him at all

that night.

“Mrs. Windsor,” the investigator said. “I have what you asked for.”

I sat down slowly in the chair by the window, the phone pressed close to my ear, my other hand gripping the armrest tighter than I meant to.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Elliot Windsor has spent the last decade building a private holding structure across four different jurisdictions, he said. “Layered, deliberate, clearly built by someone who understood exactly how to keep his name off every piece of paper that mattered. I found him through an old employee, a former assistant who left his organization years ago on bad terms and was willing to talk once she understood I was not working for him.”

“And Meridian Crest,” I said.

“Traces back to him,” the investigator confirmed. “Three steps removed, but it traces back. He set it up the same year you passed the company to Julian. He has been sitting on it ever since, waiting.”

I closed my eyes.

Some small, foolish part of me had hoped he would come back with nothing, that the resentment I remembered from Elliot’s letters had simply burned itself out somewhere in the years since I had last heard from him, leaving nothing behind but an old woman’s guilt over a decision she still believed had been the right one.

“There is more,” the investigator said.

“Go on,” I said.

“He has been tracking this family for years. Not just Julian. Gail as well. Business dealings, personal movements, security arrangements. He has people watching this family the way most men watch a market they intend to eventually corner. I do not believe hiring Jude Wolfe was his first move against you. I believe it was simply the first move he made that finally left a trail.”

The words settled into my chest like stones.

“Why now?” I said quietly. “Why wait a decade and strike now?” y

“I do not know yet,” the investigator said. “But if I had to guess, I would say something changed recently Something gave him an opening he did not have before.”

I thought of Katia. Of the marriage finally surfacing into the open of everything shifting in fulian’s life in ways that would have been impossible to predict a year ago, a wife was discovered, an heir was confirmed, and a company more stable and more valuable than it had ever been under Julian’s careful stewardship.

A man like Elliot would have noticed all of it

A man like Elliot would have understood, better than almost anyone else, that Julian’s happiness was also Julian’s greatest vulnerability, a wife and a son and a growing family that could be threatened in ways an empire alone never could be.

“Thank you,” I said. “For your work. I need everything you have, documented properly, ready to hand to my

+15 Bonus

grandson the moment I decide it is time.”

“I will have the full report to you within the week,” he said.

I ended the call and sat there in the quiet of my own sitting room for a long time, the weight of what I now knew pressing down heavier than the uncertainty ever had.

I had spent a decade telling myself that silence had been protection.

I understood now that it had only ever been postponement, and the bill for that postponement had finally come due, in the shape of a pregnant woman thrown down a set of stairs seven years ago and a marriage/nearly destroyed by a man wearing another man’s stolen name.

I picked up the phone one more time and dialed Julian’s number.

He answered on the first ring.

“Grandma,” he said. “Is everything alright?”

“No,” I said. “It is time we talked. Properly. Come to the house tonight, and bring Katia with you. There are things I should have told both of you a very long time ago.”

Julian was quiet on the other end of the line for a moment.

“You are frightening me,” he said. “What is this about?”

“Not over the phone,” I said. “I owe you the truth face to face, Julian. I have owed it to you for longer than you know, and I have run out of good reasons to keep postponing it.”

“Is Gail alright?” he asked. “Is Aiden.”

“Everyone is safe,” I said. “This is not about anyone’s safety tonight. It is about something I should have told you years ago, before you ever became old enough to ask the right questions about your own family.”

He was silent again, and I could hear him thinking, weighing whatever he imagined this might mean against everything he had already learned to expect from the last several months of upheaval in his own life.

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