My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 65

-Katia-

Sam texted at 11:47 PM: I’m outside. Go.

That was our system. She parked two blocks from the building, engine running, and sent one word when the coast was clear. I was already dressed. The carbon fiber suit lived in the false floor of my wardrobe behind the winter coats, a cavity I had engineered myself, measured to the centimeter, and lined with sound dampening material so the zip didn’t carry. Aiden had never found it. He found everything eventually, but he hadn’t found this. I intended to keep it that way.

I checked on him first. Always. Every single time, without exception, I stood in the frame of his door for thirty seconds before I left. He was on his back tonight, one arm flung wide, duvet halfway off, the nightlight casting everything in soft amber. His breathing was deep and even. The monitor on his bedside table was linked to Sam’s phone, she’d see any movement, hear any sound, and be up those stairs in four minutes if she needed to be.

Four minutes was fast enough.

I pulled the door almost closed and went to get my helmet.

The Bronx circuit wasn’t a circuit in any official sense. It was three blocks of decommissioned industrial road behind a logistics park that had been closed for two years, bordered on two sides by chain–link and on the third by a concrete wall someone had been painting since before I started racing here. The artwork was extraordinary, actually. I had spent more time looking at that wall over the years than I had ever admitted to anyone.

Tonight it was lit by floodlights someone had rigged to a generator, and the crowd was pressed three deep along the chain link on both sides, and the noise was already at the level it reached when something worth watching was about to happen.

I arrived in Sam’s car. I changed in the back, an exercise in spatial awareness I had perfected over years, and walked to the start line in full gear. Blacked–out visor. No name. No number. Just Catwoman, the way I had always been Catwoman, which was entirely and without apology.

Twelve riders. Mostly men, a few women, one I recognized from the Monaco underground circuit who gave me a nod I returned with a tilt of the helmet. The bike was already there. Sam had arranged collection and delivery through a contact who asked no questions and charged accordingly.

I ran my hand along the seat the way I always did before a race. Not superstition. Just the physical act of making contact, of saying to the machine: I know you, you know me, let’s do this properly.

The starter raised the flag

I found the line in my head the geometry of the three blocks, the camber of the road on the second turn, and the slight compression at the far end that most riders didn’t account for until they’d done it twice. I had done it nine times. I knew where the road breathed and where it held its breath.

The flag dropped.

Under four minutes. That was the target I had set myself in the car on the way over, which meant I needed to take the second turn wider than felt comfortable and trust the compression on the exit. Most people didn’t trust the compression. They braked before it, which killed their speed on the back straight, which was where this race was won or lost.

I trusted the compression.

I won by a margin that made the crowd do something between a scream and a silence that particular stunned beat before the noise caught up with what had just happened. I felt it even through the helmet, even at the speed I was moving when I crossed

the line

I didn’t stop. That was the rule thad made for myself years ago and had never broken. You crossed the lime, you kept moving You were gone before the crowd finished reacting. Catwoman didn’t take bows Catwoman didn’t give interviews Catwoman existed in the gap between the flag dropping and the noise arriving and nowhere else.

I was already turning onto the service road when I saw him.

+25 Bonus

He was standing at the far end of the chain–link, slightly back from the crowd, and he wasn’t filming the race. He was filming me. The camera, a proper one, not a phone, was pointed directly at where I was and had been pointed at where I was for what looked like the entire race. Not the start line, not the action, not the other riders. Me.

I clocked the position. The angle. The fact that he had placed himself at the exit point specifically.

I took the service road at speed, turned left instead of right at the first junction, cut through the logistics park access route, and came out on a street that ran parallel to Sam’s position. By the time anyone following my expected exit route reached the road I was supposed to be on, I was two blocks away and moving in the wrong direction for them to matter.

I pulled over after three blocks and sat on the bike in the dark for a moment.

Someone was watching Catwoman specifically. Not the race. Not the other riders. Me.

I thought about Julian’s intelligence analyst. The one Gail had mentioned. Spent twelve years tracking financial criminals, now applies the same methodology to racing aliases. I thought about Julian in the boardroom, sitting very still with his folder, and the other breach, Katia. I thought about the drone grid on the bridge and the heat signature and the man in the crowd tonight with a proper camera pointed at my exit line.

H4

Then I stopped thinking about it, because thinking about it in the dark on a street in the Bronx at midnight was not useful, and I had a six–year–old asleep at home.

I texted Sam: Change of route. Give me ten.

She responded in four seconds: Clocked. Moving.

Back home I scrubbed the suit in the bathroom sink the way I always did, cold water, no soap, thirty seconds, and hang in the cavity behind the coats to dry overnight. The helmet went in its case. The case went under the false floor. The floor went back. The coats went back. I stood in front of my wardrobe looking exactly like a wardrobe.

Aiden was still asleep. I stood in his doorway for another thirty seconds, the cool–down version of the pre–race check, making sure everything was exactly as I had left it.

It was.

I poured wine I probably didn’t need and stood at the floor–to–ceiling windows with the Manhattan skyline doing what it always did at this hour glittering, indifferent, enormous. I had stood at this window more times than I could count, at all hours, in all states, and the city had never once offered me an opinion about any of it. found that useful.

I should stop racing. I knew that. The rational case for stopping was overwhelming: I was a public figure now, I had a son, I had a company, I had a contract with the most powerful private conglomerate in the country, and there was a than with a proper camera standing at my exit line in the Bronx at midnight.

I knew all of that.

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I turned the wine glass slowly in my hand and looked at the skyline and thought about the way the road felt under the tyres at the compression point, the way the bike responded when you trusted it, and the specific quality of silence that existed in the half second before the flag dropped when the whole world contracted to a single point and everything else the company, contract, the boardroom, Julian Windsor and his almost smiles and his intelligence analysts and his drone grids disappeared

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