Chapter 33

[ 1,058 words ]

Julian’s POV

I didn’t pull away. I didn’t even stiffen. Instead, I felt a strange, blurred sense of contentment wash over me, a feeling so foreign it felt like a bug in my programming. I reached for my phone with my free hand. I knew the consequences. I knew the PR team back in New York would have an absolute meltdown. I didn’t care.

I snapped a picture. It was a “stolen” shot, her hand draped over mine, our fingers not quite intertwined but making undeniable, heavy contact. The background was the blurred, dark mahogany of the jazz bar, shadows dancing over our skin. I posted it instantly to my main account with no caption or explanation. Just the image of a Windsor being touched by a woman who wasn’t the one he’d stood at the altar with forty-eight hours ago.

“You’re going to break the internet, Julian,” she whispered, her voice husky and low, vibrating through the small space between us.

“Let it break,” I muttered, my gaze fixed on her. “It’s been too rigid for too long anyway p>

As we finally left the club and walked back toward the villa where she was staying, the heavy silence of the French night settled between us. There was no intimacy, no lingering touches, no whispered promises of what would happen behind closed doors. We walked with a respectful distance, the sound of our footsteps echoing off the stone walls.

But as I watched her silhouette move ahead of me, the way she carried herself with such unapologetic grace, a cold, sharp realization began to pierce through my drunken haze. It was a sobering thought that no amount of Bordeaux could drown.

My mind should have been on “Kat.” For six years, the ghost of that girl in Las Vegas had been my North Star, the only thing that kept me human in a world of numbers. I had kept her marriage certificate in my private safe like a holy relic. I had spent millions on private investigators, trying to find the woman who owned my legal heart, the woman I had promised myself to in a fever dream of neon lights and cheap whiskey.

Yet, standing here under the French stars, watching Katia Kensington reach for the gate of her villa, I realized with a jolt of terror that I hadn’t thought about the Vegas girl once tonight.

Why?

I questioned myself, the “machine” in my head struggling to compute the logic. Why was Katia Kensington, my sister-in-law, the supposed “disgrace” of her family, the woman I had originally looked at with nothing but professional curiosity, making me forget the only woman I ever claimed to love?

She was a Kensington. She was a liability. She was a mother to a child that belonged to a “stranger.” Everything about her screamed danger to my reputation and my empire.

And yet, as she turned to wave a final, silent goodnight before disappearing into the shadows of the villa, I knew I was in deep. The girl from Vegas was a memory, a fading photograph in the back of my mind. But Katia Kensington was a fire, bright and burning right in front of me. And for the first time in my life, I realized I would rather burn with the fire than continue to live with the ghost.

The flight back from France had been a vacuum of silence, a pressurized cabin of forced isolation that I desperately needed. But the world I returned to was anything but quiet. The moment the wheels of the Windsor private jet touched the tarmac at Teterboro, my phone had become a live wire, a constant vibration of notifications that felt like a physical assault. Lawyers were demanding statements, PR managers were drafting “clarifications,” and there was digital vitriol in my voicemail that I didn’t even have to listen to to understand.

I ignored them all. I wasn’t in the mood for the theater of damage control.

I was back in my Manhattan office, the eighty-third-floor sanctuary that usually felt like the cockpit of the world. I stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass, staring out at the skyline as the sun began to dip behind the skyscrapers, casting long, jagged shadows across the city. The city looked like a circuit board, ordered, predictable, and cold. Exactly how I liked it.

The door to my office swung open with a heavy thud. Zane didn’t knock. He never did. He possessed the kind of arrogance that came from being the only person who had seen me bleed and lived to tell the tale. He walked in, tossed a tablet onto my mahogany desk, and slumped into the leather chair opposite my empty seat. He looked far too amused for a man whose best friend had just ignited a global scandal.

“So,” Zane started, his voice dripping with that irritatingly casual tone he used when he knew he was about to win an argument. “I went by the estate yesterday to drop off those merger revisions. I expected to find the happy couple. I expected to find you and the new Mrs. Windsor, the paper one, at least sharing an awkward, silent brunch. Instead, I found Delia wandering the East Wing alone, looking like a Victorian ghost in a designer dress, and you? You’re in France posting hand porn on Instagram p>

I didn’t turn around. I kept my gaze fixed on the distance. “It was dinner, Zane. A professional courtesy. Nothing more p>

“Professional courtesy? Julian, you don’t even give professional courtesy to the Board of Directors,” Zane laughed, the sound echoing off the glass. “The internet calls it a scandal. Your grandmother calls it a headache that requires three bottles of aspirin. But I? I call it progress. Who was she, Julian? I mean, we both know it was Katia. The silhouette, the angle of the jaw, and that particular brand of ’I don’t give a damn’ energy are hard to mistake. You might as well have tagged her p>

I finally turned my chair to face him. The head was still trying to process the logic of my own actions. I felt the weight of the last forty-eight hours settling into my bones, a cocktail of jet lag, vintage Bordeaux, and the lingering scent of jasmine that seemed to have followed me from Antibes. “It was Katia p>

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