My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 48

Digital Ashes and Glass Walls

Katia’s POV

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“Mommy, why are you breaking your clothes? Is it because they don’t fit anymore?”

Aiden’s voice startled me, cutting through the snip–crunch of industrial shears. I froze, my hand still gripping the heavy–duty metal blades. He was standing in the doorway of our private garage, clutching a juice box with both hands, his head tilted in that inquisitive way that always made my heart do a painful somersault. Every time he looked at me like that, I saw the ghost of a man I couldn’t remember.

I forced a smile, tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear with a gloved hand. “I’m just recycling, baby,” I said, my voice smooth despite the adrenaline still humming in my veins. “Sometimes, to make something new and better, you have to get rid of the old stuff. It’s like when you outgrow your Legos.”

“But that’s your superhero suit,” he pointed out, stepping over a pile of discarded, high–grade leather that had been shredded into unrecognizable strips.

“Even superheroes need an upgrade, Aiden. Now, go back inside can have dinner.”

finish your snack. Mommy has to finish the ‘trash‘ so we

Once the door clicked shut and his footsteps faded, the smile dropped from my face like a lead weight. I turned back to the workbench. On the floor lay the remnants of the custom Alpinestars suit I had worn during the Manhattan race. I had already deconstructed the internal electronics, the biometric sensors that tracked my heart rate, and the GPS transponder that recorded my lean angles and top speeds.

I wasn’t just destroying expensive

gear; I was erasing a soul.

I knew how Julian Windsor operated. He didn’t just look at a race; he dissected it. He was a man who lived in the details, the kind of predator who could identify a person by the way they shifted their weight or the millisecond they chose to brake before a turn. If I left even a scrap of that suit intact, I was handing him the leash to my neck.

I walked over to the small incinerator I’d installed in the corner of the garage. Officially, it was for the “secure destruction of proprietary hardware” for I* Technologies. It was a tax write/off for my company, but its true purpose was much darker.

I picked up the blacked–out helmet. This was the hardest part. This helmet had seen the neon lights of the Vegas strip and the grimy skyline of Manhattan. It was my crown, my shield, the only thing that allowed me to be the version of myself that wasn’t a CEO, a daughter, or a “disgraced” Kensington.

I popped the visor off first. It was a specialized anti–glare composite, designed to hide my eyes from even the most powerful high–speed cameras. I tossed it into the furnace. It melted with a sickening hiss, the black tint curling like a dying shadow before being consumed by the orange glow.

Burn it all, I thought, my jaw tight. Leave him nothing but smoke.

My phone buzzed on the workbench, vibrating against the metal surface. I swiped the screen with a trembling finger. It was an encrypted message from Samantha.

“WEG security just pinged our secondary servers. They tried to backdoor into the Manhattan circuit’s archives. I blocked the IP and redirected them to a dead–end server in Singapore, but Katia… Julian is personally overseeing the investigation. He’s not looking for a racer anymore. He’s looking for a ghost. He’s obsessed.”

I stared at the text until the screen went black. Obsessed. That word carried a weight that made it hard to breathe. Julian wasn’t just looking for “Catwoman” because she was a fast racer. He was looking for her because she was the only variable in his perfectly ordered world that he couldn’t calculate. And he hated, absolutely loathed, being outcalculated

I don’t know why he was looking for Catwoman, i am not ready for the world to know who Catwoman was. And also, no one can claim to be me without consequences.

I picked up a heavy mallet and brought it down on the bike’s ECU, the brain of the machine. The silicon chip shartered into a

Digital Achertind Glass Walls

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thousand glittering pieces, destroying the telemetry data from my record–breaking run.

Julian Windsor wanted a briefing? He wanted to talk about “variables” and “elusive talents” during our contract meeting? Fine. I would give him exactly what he asked for. I would walk into his office tomorrow ina five–thousand–dollar Chanel suit, smelling of Jo Malone instead of high–octane gasoline, and I would watch him choke on the silence of his own empty evidence locker.

I spent the next hour meticulously cleaning the garage. I swept up the carbon fiber shards, the leather scraps, and the metallic dust. By the time I was finished, there wasn’t a single trace of the woman who had dorninated the track the night before. I was back to being Katia Kensington: the billionaire tech mogul, the single mother, the woman who supposedly didn’t know a spark plug from a lipstick.

I headed upstairs to the master bathroom, stripping off my work clothes and stepping into a steaming hot shower. I scrubbed my skin until it was raw, desperate to wash away the scent of burnt rubber and exhaust that seemed to cling to my pores.

As the water slicked my hair back, I leaned my head against the cool marble tiler thought about Gail’s words from the day before. “He doesn’t like Delia, and he will never touch her.”

Why? Delia was everything a man like Julian was supposed to want. She was compliant, beautiful, and carried the right name. If he wasn’t touching her, it meant his heart, or at least his hunger, was anchored somewhere else.

I looked down at my hand. My ring finger was bare, but the skin felt heavy where the 500–billion–dollar ring usually sat. I only wore it on a chain beneath my clothes now, a secret weight against my heart.

Jules. The name flickered in my mind like a dying candle. The man from Vegas. The man who had given me Aiden and then vanished into the desert heat. If Jules ever saw me again, would he even recognize me? Or was I just a blur of motion and intoxication to him, the same way he was to me? He was a phantom, a memory of a ring and a night of rebellion.

I wasn’t just hiding a child.

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