My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 84

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You Picked the Wrong Woman

~Katia-

I found out on a Thursday.

Sam put her tablet on my desk at eight in the morning with the expression she reserved for things that were going to require a decision before the day was out. I was mid–coffee, mid–email, mid–the–particular–focused state I built in the first hour of every working day, and I looked at the screen with the mild attention of someone expecting a logistics update.

Then I looked at it with a different kind of attention entirely.

I am Catwoman. Always was.

I read the caption. I watched the clip. I looked at the woman in the borrowed suit beside the wrong car making the wrong face at the wrong camera.

I put my coffee down.

“How many?” I said.

“Fifteen,” Sam said. “As of this morning. More coming, by the looks of the forums.”

I looked at the screen for another moment. At this woman, this perfectly ordinary woman who had decided that Catwoman was a costume you could put on with enough confidence and the right filter, I felt something move through me that was not quite anger and not quite amusement and was entirely, specifically its own thing.

Eight years.

I had been racing since I was eighteen years old. I had built Catwoman in the dark, in circuits nobody photographed, in cities I moved through like a ghost. I had raced in the rain and the heat and the specific 2 AM cold of a New York winter when the tarmac contracted and the car behaved differently and you had to feel the difference before your instruments told you it was there. I had funded my Harvard education one race at a time. I had built a company on the winnings. I had raised a son. I had kept this identity so clean and so contained that the most resourced man in New York – with his intelligence analysts and his drone grids and his six–week Dubai security deployment – had not managed to put a name to my face in four years of trying.

And this woman was standing in a supermarket car park telling the internet she was me.

No.

I picked up my phone and called my legal team. Not the I* Technologies legal team – my private lawyers, the ones who handled the things that didn’t go through company channels, and the ones who had been with me since the early years when I had needed people who asked no questions and produced clean results.

Marcus picked up on the first ring.

“I have a job,” I said. “Sensitive. I need it done correctly.”

“Tell me.”

“Fifteen individuals have publicly claimed to be a specific persona that belongs to me. I want cease and desist letters sent to every single one of them. I want the letters to be specific race dates, lap times, circuit records, and technical details that prove categorically that whoever sent the letter knows exactly who the persona actually is and exactly what these individuals are not.” I poured myself a fresh coffee. “The letters go out under a shell entity. Not my name, not I*, not anything traceable to me personally.”

“What shell entity?”

“Create one. Today. Something clean.” I thought for a moment. “Register it as the legal representative of the individual known publicly as Catwoman. That’s it. No other information.”

You Picked Wrong Woman

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He didn’t answer right away. “You want Catwoman to have a law firîtt.”

“I want Catwoman to have a law firm, a registered legal entity, and the full weight of what that implies landing in fifteen people’s inboxes before the end of the week.” I sat down. “Can you do that?”

“By Friday,” Marcus said. I could hear him already writing.

“Thursday,” I said. “I want them reading it over their morning coffee.”

Another pause. The sound of faster writing. “Done.”

“One more thing.” I pulled up the forum thread Sam had shown me and scrolled through the comments – the racing community’s reaction, the speculation, the chaos of fifteen simultaneous claims and nobody knowing what to believe. “I want a spokesperson. A professional communications representative who will speak on Catwoman’s behalf publicly. No face, no name, no camera appearances. Statements only. Issued through encrypted channels and released to press through the shell entity.”

“A ghost spokesperson,” Marcus said.

“A professional ghost spokesperson,” I said. “The best one you can find. Someone who has worked for clients who needed to be powerful in public and invisible in private.”

“I know someone,” Marcus said. “She’s extraordinary.”

“Hire her.”

I hung up.

Sam had been standing by the window through the entire call with her arms folded and the expression she wore when she was impressed but had decided not to say so yet. She looked at me. I looked at her.

“Thursday,” she said.

“Thursday.”

“Fifteen cease and desist letters. A shell entity. A ghost spokesperson.” She tilted her head. “Before their morning coffee.”

“Is there a problem with Thursday?”

“Absolutely not.” She picked up her tablet. “I just want to make sure I’m fully appreciating what’s happening. You’ve been letting the fake Catwoman trend run for three weeks without reacting, and now—”

“I wasn’t letting it run,” I said. “I was deciding what to do with it.”

“And what you’ve decided to do with it is deploy lawyers.”

“And a spokesperson.”

Sam looked at me for a moment with the expression she had been perfecting for years – the one that was equal parts professional admiration and the specific exasperation of someone who had watched me make decisions like this for long enough to know that questioning them was a waste of both our time.

“The racing world is going to lose its mind,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Let it.”

I picked up my coffee. Outside the window, Manhattan was doing its morning thing – moving, building, and indifferent. Somewhere in this city, fifteen women had woken up this morning thinking they had gotten away with something.

By Thursday they would understand that Catwoman had a law firm, a legal entity, a professional spokesperson, and twelve years of documented race data that would make their borrowed suits and their wrong cars and their supermarket car parks look exactly like what they were.

212

You Picked Wrong Womon

Took a sip of coffee

“Sam,” I said.

“Yes?”

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