My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 420

The Intrusion

Delia’s POV

The doorbell rang just after eleven.

I was in the kitchen rinsing the last of the breakfast plates, still wearing one of Noah’s shirts because it was the first thing I had grabbed that morning. My hair was loose. No makeup. The kind of ordinary domestic mess that still felt new enough to be fragile. I dried my hands on a towel and went to answer it without thinking twice.

Elliot stood on the other side of the door.

He looked exactly the same as the last time I had seen him–expensive suit, cold eyes, that half–smile that never reached anywhere real. He took one look at me in Noah’s shirt, and the smirk deepened.

He walked past me into the house like he owned the floor under his feet.

“So,” he said, glancing around the entryway, “you are fucking this reject?”

My stomach dropped. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The words sat somewhere behind my teeth, stuck.

Noah came out of the hallway before I could find an answer. He must have heard the doorbell too. He stopped dead when he saw his father standing in the middle of our living room.

“You don’t get to call my wife that.” Noah’s voice was low. He pointed a finger straight at Elliot. “Not in this house. Not ever.”

Elliot’s eyebrows rose like he was watching something mildly entertaining.

“You talk back at me because of this cheap slut I asked you to marry?”

The word landed like a slap on its own. Cheap. Slut. He said it the way someone might comment on the weather. I felt heat rush up my neck and into my face. My hands curled into fists at my sides, but I still couldn’t speak. Every insult I had ever swallowed in the last two years seemed to rise up at once and

choke me silent.

Noah took a step forward.

“You might have asked me to marry her,” he said, “but she is my wife now. State the reason for your visit.”

Elliot laughed under his breath. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the roses that were still in vases from the night before, the two coffee mugs on the counter, and the evidence of a life that had started to look shared. His gaze came back to me and stayed there, deliberate and ugly.

“Look at her,” he said to Noah, as if I wasn’t standing three feet away. “Bare legs. Your shirt. Hair like she just rolled out of someone’s bed. This is what you chose to defend? I picked her because she was useful and desperate. Nothing more. She spent two years clinging to Julian like a barnacle and still couldn’t make him touch her. And now she is here playing house with you like that history never happened.”

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The intrusion

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I felt the blood drain from my face. He was saying it out loud. All of it. The years of smiling for cameras beside a man who barely looked at me. The nights I had gone to bed alone while the city whispered that ! was a temporary decoration. Elliot was peeling it open in front of his own son like it was entertainment.

Noah’s jaw flexed.

“Watch your fucking mouth.”

“Or what?” Elliot asked mildly. “You will hit me over her? Over this?” He waved a hand in my direction like I was an object that had started to smell. “She is not worth the energy. I got what I needed from the arrangement. The connection. The access. This thing-” he paused, looking me up and down with open contempt, “-is not worth being a Vesper wife.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.

I finally found my voice. It came out thinner than I wanted, but it came.

“Exactly who are you angry at?” I asked. “You walk into my home and start barking orders. Do I look like your dog?”

Elliot turned his head slowly toward me. The mild amusement was gone. What replaced it was colder.

He moved faster than I expected.

The slap cracked across my cheek hard enough to snap my head to the side. Pain bloomed hot and sharp. My eyes watered instantly. I staggered back a step, one hand flying up to my face, the taste of copper already in my mouth where my teeth had cut the inside of my cheek.

Noah roared.

He closed the distance in two strides and punched Elliot square in the face. The sound was solid and ugly. Elliot staggered, hand flying to his mouth. When he pulled it away, there was blood on his fingers.

“You don’t get to lay your hands on my wife,” Noah snarled. His chest was heaving. His fists were still clenched. “You don’t touch her. You don’t speak to her like that. You don’t walk into this house and treat her like garbage.”

Elliot straightened slowly. He touched the corner of his mouth again, looked at the blood, and then he laughed. The sound was short and sharp and completely without humor.

“Wife?” he said. He laughed again, harder this time. “You call this reject a wife?”

He turned back to me. His eyes were bright with something mean and satisfied.

“Tell me, Delia. Just who fucks better between my son and Julian?”

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