My Accidental Billionaire Husband のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 121 - チャプター 130

~Julian~My grandmother told me about the lunch at eight thirty in the morning.Not as a question. As information. "Katia is coming at noon. Gail will be here. I expect you at the table."I looked at my phone for a moment after she hung up. Then I called Zane."Did you know about this?""About what?""Grandmother. Katia. Lunch. Today."He had a way of making me wait while he processed God fucking knows what. "No. But I'm not surprised."I wasn't surprised either. Grandma Celeste had been moving pieces around a board since before I understood there was a board. She had arranged the Windsor family dinner that introduced Katia to the family. She had specifically requested Katia's presence at every significant family event since. She had told me, in a corridor after a dinner, that Katia was the woman I was supposed to marry.This lunch was not a coincidence.I told Delia at nine. She received the information with the composed stillness she had developed since Dubai, quieter than before, m

~Katia~Mother called on a Thursday with the warmth she deployed when she was about to do something I wasn't going to like."A spa weekend," she said. "Just you and me. Girls' trip. You've been working too hard, Katia; everyone can see it. Two nights at Rosewood. My treat."I looked at Sam across the office. Sam looked back."Just us?" I said."Just us," Mama said. "Mother and daughter. Long overdue."I should have said no. I knew I should have said no. I said yes because Dad had called me the week before and said quietly that Mother had been having a difficult few months, and he thought it would mean something if I made the effort, and because, despite everything, I was still capable of making efforts for people who had hurt me when I believed the effort was genuine.The effort was not genuine.I arrived at the Rosewood on Friday afternoon to find that the spa weekend had three additional guests.I discovered this when a man knocked on my door at seven PM holding roses. He was tall a

DeliaI’ve always been the "good" daughter. The one who wore the right dresses, smiled at the right donors, and never made a scene unless it was choreographed for maximum impact. But sitting in the plush, overly silent library of the Windsor estate, I felt like a background character in my own life.Julian was never home. And when he was, he looked through me like I was a piece of expensive furniture he’d inherited but didn't know where to place. I was a Kensington, raised to be the crown jewel of the family, yet here I was, playing house in a mausoleum while my sister, Katia, seemed to occupy every corner of Julian’s mind. It wasn't just the lack of attention; it was the erasure. I was his wife on paper, a secret contract meant to solidify the Kensington-Windsor alliance, but I was strictly forbidden from uttering a word of it to the public. To the world, I was just another socialite; to Julian, I was a ghost he’d paid to stay quiet.By Friday, the silence of the estate became deafen

~Katia~Gail had described it as a small birthday party.Thirty children, seventeen adults, a bouncy castle in the garden, and a woman whose name I never caught who kept offering me mini quiches. Small was a relative concept when Gail was organising something.Aiden had been ready an hour early. He had put on his good shirt without being asked—the navy one he reserved for occasions he had decided mattered—and had spent the car ride explaining to me the structural differences between two types of go-kart chassis with the focused energy of someone who had been saving this information for the right audience."Will there be anyone there who knows about racing?" he asked."It's a six-year-old's birthday party," I said."That's not what I asked."I had no answer for that, so I said nothing and drove.We had been there forty minutes when Julian arrived.He was dropping Gail off; that was obvious from the way he pulled up. The car barely stopped, Gail already opening her door. He was not dres

~Katia~I read the article at six forty-five AM, standing in my kitchen in my robe.I read it once. Then I put my phone face down on the counter and stood very still for thirty seconds.Then I called Sam.She answered immediately. "I've read it.""Board meeting," I said. "Nine AM. Everyone.""Already sending the invites," she said.I hung up and went to get dressed.The board meeting ran forty minutes.I presented everything Sam and I had built over the past weeks, the eighteen-month campaign; Daniel Osei's recruitment and what he had fed them; the fabricated security audit failures that had been quietly circulated to procurement contacts; and the strategic leaks that had cost IG three government contracts we should have won. I put it on the screen in front of twelve people, and I walked them through it without editorialising, without dramatics, just the facts in sequence.When I finished, the room was very quiet."Are we under threat of acquisition?" the chair of the investment commi