Semua Bab My Accidental Billionaire Husband : Bab 271 - Bab 280

~Jude~I walked to the floor-to-ceiling glass of the hotel suite and stared down at the sprawling, grid-locked veins of Manhattan. From here, the world looked organized, clean, and entirely under control. It was a lie, of course. My entire life, my entire presence in this city, and the very foundation of my claim to Katia Kensington were built on a precarious pile of falsehoods.Julian Windsor was the wild card in that pile.He was going to be a problem. That was the only thing I was certain of. I knew the game I was playing; Katia was mine, even if the marriage certificate was a work of fiction, even if the history I claimed with her was something I had manufactured to bridge the gap between where she was and where I wanted her to be. She was the prize, and I had invested too much to let her slip through my fingers.But Windsor? Windsor was something else entirely.Technically, he was her brother-in-law. That was the narrative. But the way he looked at her—the way he protected her, t

~Julian~The cabin of the jet was a masterpiece of cold opulence, a sanctuary designed to insulate me from the realities of the outside world. It was a space defined by dark, bespoke Italian leather, polished mahogany that had been cured for decades, and the silent, terrifying efficiency of a Gulfstream G700 that cost more than most people would earn in ten lifetimes. It was an environment of absolute authority, where the laws of the outside world dissolved into the hum of twin Rolls-Royce engines.I sat in the single leather armchair, a glass of 1982 Petrus in my hand, the crystal catching the amber-hued ambient lighting and casting deep, ruby shadows across the table. It was a vintage that most would hesitate to open, let alone consume while cruising at forty thousand feet. I did not hesitate. For me, wealth was not a currency; it was a tool, an instrument of absolute control that ensured every desire I possessed was met with immediate, seamless compliance. Across from me, Katia st

~Julian~I woke before she did, the way I always woke before she did, and lay there for a long time looking at the ceiling instead of at her.I had fucked up yesterday.I knew exactly what I had done and exactly why I had done it, and neither piece of that knowledge made the act itself any less wrong. She was my wife. I had known it for months, carried that knowledge through every meeting and every dinner and every night I spent in her bed without telling her the one thing that would have explained all of it. She did not know. She had no idea that the man lying beside her in this villa had a marriage certificate with her name on it locked away in a private vault in Manhattan, a ring he had been carrying since before she knew what his face looked like in daylight.She only knew Jules as a name from seven years ago, a shape, an absence.So when I found out she was sitting in Jude Wolfe's suite, telling him she wanted to give him a chance, something in me had simply stopped operating on

~Katia~The boat dropped us at a strip of sand that should not have existed.It rose out of the lagoon like something the ocean had only agreed to lend us for a few hours, a narrow crescent of pale white sand surrounded entirely by water on every side, with nothing else visible except the distant outline of our own island behind us and the endless blue stretching out in front. The resort staff had been here earlier in the day. A single low table sat in the center of the sandbank, candles already planted in the sand around it, waiting for the dark to give them their purpose, and a woven blanket spread beneath it for us to sit on instead of chairs.Julian helped me out of the boat himself.The water was warm around my ankles, the sand soft and cool beneath it, and for a moment neither of us moved toward the table. We simply stood there, his hand still holding mine, looking at the strange, fragile beauty of a piece of land that the tide would erase by morning."It will be gone by tomorr

~Delia~I saw the photograph before I understood what I was looking at.It came up in my feed the way everything came up in my feed, scrolling past without asking permission, and then my thumb stopped moving entirely because the account posting it was Julian's, and the image did not match the version of his account I had learned to expect. He was not someone who posted often. In the two years I had lived under his roof I could count the personal images on one hand. A single photograph from a trip to France the year before, nothing more than a hand resting near two glasses of wine on a table, no faces, no names, nothing that told the world anything except that he had been somewhere and had a drink while he was there. I had stared at that photograph for longer than I wanted to admit, trying to determine whose hand was not in the frame, and had never found an answer.That was the closest he had ever come to sharing anything about his life outside the boardroom.This was not that.A sing