All Chapters of Celebrity Bodyguard : Chapter 11 - Chapter 16

Chapter 11: The Inside ManThe podcast clip went viral fast. Within forty-eight hours, Julian’s confession was clipped, looped, and spread across every corner of the internet. #JuliansBodyguard was trending worldwide, and amateur sleuths were racing to figure out who he was.For Kael, it was a security nightmare. For Julian, it felt like relief.It was 3 AM. on a Friday. Julian was asleep in the bedroom, tangled in the sheets, breathing slowly and even. The soft rise and fall of his chest were the only peaceful things in the room.Kael wasn’t sleeping.He sat at the dining table, three laptop screens lighting his face blue in the dark. The last few days had softened something in him. Tonight, that was gone. The stalker’s silence wasn’t retreating. It was planned.He pulled up the security logs and started hunting the leak.Apex was solid from the outside. That meant the leak was inside. Kael opened a document and started laying out what he knew.Incident 1 (The Garage). The photo was

Chapter 13: The Fallout By morning, Apex had already sent a replacement.His name was Diaz. He was competent, polite, and a complete stranger. He stood by the door the way Kael used to, hands clasped the same way, checking the same locks in the same order, and it made Julian’s chest hurt every time he looked at him. Everything about him was slightly off — the wrong height in the doorway, the wrong silence when he wasn’t speaking, the wrong way of existing in a room that still felt like it belonged to someone else.“Mr. Vance.” Diaz held out a clipboard. “I’ll need you to review the updated security protocol.”Julian didn’t take it. “Where’s Kael?”“Reassigned, sir. I don’t have details.”Julian turned and walked into the bedroom and shut the door harder than he meant to.He sat on the edge of the bed where, two nights ago, Kael had put himself between Julian and a live grenade. The sheets still smelled faintly like him — clean cotton and something sharper underneath, the same scent t

Chapter 15: EncoreThe detective’s office smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet. Julian sat across from a metal desk, a stack of bank statements in front of him, Diaz standing by the door like furniture.“Take your time,” Detective Ruiz said. “We need you to flag anything familiar. Names, addresses, anything that pings.”Julian scanned the pages. Transfers into an account under Brenda’s real name — not Hayes, something else, something ordinary — going back eight months. Most were small. One wasn’t.Fifteen thousand dollars, wired six months ago, from an account holder listed only as a shell company: Lang Holdings LLC.Julian’s stomach turned over. “I don’t know this.”“You’re sure?”“I’ve never heard of it.” He looked up. “Should I have?”Ruiz slid another page across the desk — property records tied to the same shell company. A warehouse on the east side of the city. Leased two weeks ago.“We pulled financials on everyone connected to Ms. Hayes once we knew she didn’t act alone,”