My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 95

My phone buzzed.

I looked at the screen. Unknown number – but the format of it, the specific prefix, was one I recognised from the two previous Dubai trips. My race contact I opened the message.

Night race. 0100. Location follows. Encrypted link – memorise and delete.

I read the location. I memorised it in the thirty seconds it took to read it twice. Then I deleted the message and cleared the notification and put the phone in my pocket and looked at the city.

The circuit was in the industrial port district – the same general area as the previous two years, but a different specific route. The back straight ran along the waterfront. The revised configuration Julian had sent me on the jet – the one I had absolutely not been thinking about – was visible in the location details. The approach to the final corner was going to be faster than anything I had run on this circuit before.

Good.

I heard them before I saw them.

The helicopters first – the low thrum of rotary blades cutting the evening air somewhere to the north. I looked up. Three of them, moving in a pattern that was too deliberate to be news coverage or tourism. They were covering a grid. Overlapping sweeps, systematic, the kind of flight path that suggested they were looking for something rather than going somewhere.

Then lower, quieter, moving along the waterfront below my balcony: drones. Small, fast, running without navigation lights – the kind of equipment that serious security operations used when they needed coverage without visibility.

I watched them for a moment.

Then I smiled.

He had deployed them already. The event wasn’t until tomorrow night, and he had his drones in the air tonight, mapping the city, pre–sweeping the perimeter, and establishing the grid that would cover the race circuit during the 24 Hour Race. Facial recognition, heat signatures, vehicle tracking – all of it building the net that was supposed to catch a woman who had been racing in this city for four years and had never once been caught.

He really was hunting.

I watched a drone arc over the waterfront below and bank north toward the port district and disappear into the evening haze.

Three floors above me, in a suite I had not seen and would not see, Julian Windsor was presumably watching the same feeds on a screen somewhere, building the same map I was looking at from the other side.

My phone buzzed again. Aiden’s nightly call early, because of the time difference.

I stepped back from the balcony railing and answered.

–

r

“Mum.” His voice came through clear and immediate, with the specific quality of Aiden on the phone – always direct, always present, never the half–attention of someone doing something else simultaneously. “How is Dubai?”

“Hot,” I said. “And very tall.”

“Gail made pasta,” he said. “Not as good as yours, but I didn’t say that.”

“Very diplomatic.”

“I’m learning,” he paused and continued. “Are you okay?”

I looked at the city. At the last of the evening light on the Gulf. At the drone just visible against the darkening sky, still running its grid.

“I’m good, baby,” I said. “I’m really good.”

2/3

Dubai Art of

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