جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 310

~ Delia POV ~The door slammed so hard behind me that the painting in the entryway shuddered on its hook, and I didn't care; I didn't care about a single thing in this mansion anymore, not the painting, not the vase on the side table that I picked up and threw against the wall before I'd even taken my heels off, watching it shatter into a hundred pieces across the marble like something inside me finally matched the room.The crash felt good. I threw the second one too, the smaller one from the console table, and watched the flowers scatter across the floor with the water still dripping off the stems, and I stood there in the wreckage of my own foyer in a dress I'd paid four months of allowance for, and I laughed.I actually laughed.Because that was the part nobody in that dining room understood. Katia had stood in the middle of her own penthouse and told me, plainly, in front of our parents, in front of the staff, in front of everyone, that she was sleeping with my husband, and I had

~ Katia POV ~The nausea had slammed into me thirty minutes earlier, right after I stared at two clear, pink lines on a small plastic stick that refused to disappear no matter how many times I blinked or how hard I wished them away.I was still trying to steady my breathing when Sam walked into my office, tablet already in hand, launching straight into the quarterly projections with her usual crisp, no-nonsense efficiency. I hadn’t absorbed a single word. My hands were folded tightly on top of a closed folder I hadn’t opened once during the entire meeting. The numbers on the page in front of me blurred into meaningless shapes."Katia."I blinked slowly. Sam had stopped talking and was watching me closely.“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”“I’ve repeated the same sentence three times now,” she replied, setting the tablet down on her lap. Her eyes narrowed in that way she had when she decided the conversation was no longer about business. “Are you alright?”I considered lying. I had become dang

Julian’s POVI left Katia’s office and drove straight back to Manhattan. The drive from Brooklyn passed in a blur. I barely remembered stopping at lights or changing lanes. My mind kept replaying the same thing over and over. She was pregnant. She knew. And she still had not said a single word to me.I parked in the underground garage at WEG and took the private elevator up. My jaw stayed tight the whole way. I walked straight into my office and found Zane already there, sitting on the couch with his laptop open on his knees.“You look like shit,” he said the second I stepped inside.“Thank God I found you here,” I said, closing the door behind me. “I might have done something stupid. I need to know I’m not losing my mind.”Zane closed his laptop and leaned back. “Julian Windsor losing his mind? That can only be about Katia.”I started pacing the office. I stopped by the big window and looked down at the city below. Cars moved like small dots. People walked along the sidewalks. Everyt

~ Katia POV ~I didn't call ahead.Calling ahead gave people time to prepare their faces, time to decide which version of the truth they were going to offer before you'd even walked through the door, and I had spent enough of my life sitting across from people who had prepared their faces. I was done being polite about it.The Windsor mansion sat at the end of a long private driveway that I had driven up more times in the past two years than I could count, and every single time I had believed I was coming as a guest. A welcome visitor. A friend of the family who had somehow, graciously, been allowed a seat at a table that had nothing to do with her.I parked and sat in the car for exactly one minute, long enough to decide I wasn't going to cry before I got inside, and then I got out.Grandma Celeste opened the door herself, which told me someone had seen the car coming up the drive and thought better of sending staff to intercept it. Her face did something complicated the moment she s

~ Katia POV ~I sat in the car for longer than I meant to.The engine was off, the driveway stretching out in front of me, the Windsor mansion sitting in the rearview mirror like a question I had just spent the last hour answering, and I stared at the steering wheel and let everything Grandma Celeste had told me rearrange itself inside my chest into something I could actually use.Twenty-five percent of Windsor Empire Group.Every property. Every deed. Both names.A savings account opened seven years ago under the name Kat.I thought about the version of Julian I had constructed in my head over the past two years, the cold, unknowable man who kept everyone at arm's length and gave nothing away, who had looked at me across rooms and said less than he meant and more than he admitted, and I tried to square that version against a man who had been quietly putting my name on everything he owned since before I even knew his.I couldn't square it. The two versions of him refused to sit in the