Chapter 49

[ 1,057 words ]

Julian’s POV

I stood in the center of the hotel suite, the air-conditioning humming with a chill that did nothing to cool the fire burning under my skin. My hands were balled into fists, the ghost of Katia’s hair still tangled in my knuckles, the scent of her skin, a mix of expensive gin and something purely, devastatingly her, clinging to my lungs. I was breathing like I had just run a marathon, my chest heaving, my heart hammering against my ribs.

I reached for my phone, my fingers nearly trembling as I dialed Zane’s number. I didn’t wait for a greeting. “The hangar. Now, we’re leaving Vegas p>

“Julian? The night is barely p>

“Now, Zane,” I snarled, slamming the phone shut.

Ten minutes later, the door to the suite swung open. Zane walked in, his expression shifting from annoyance to sheer, unadulterated shock the moment he looked at me. I hadn’t moved. I was still standing by the window, the neon lights of the city reflecting off the glass, my suit jacket discarded on the floor.

Zane’s eyes dropped to the unmistakable, painful hardness in my trousers. He let out a low whistle, the sound cutting through the silence of the room like a blade. “Man, tell me you were not just with your sister-in-law,” he said, his voice a mix of disbelief and dark humor.

I didn’t deny it. I couldn’t. The evidence was written in the way I couldn’t catch my breath, in the raw, jagged edges of my temper. “Sometimes I just wish I had married the wrong sister,” I rasped, my voice sounding like it had been dragged over gravel. “Because why the fuck does the one woman I shouldn’t touch turn me on in every way she shouldn’t? Why does she make every other woman feel like a cardboard cutout p>

I turned to face him, the frustration boiling over. I felt like a caged animal, trapped by the very empire I had built. “Zane, I am fucked. Katia has a husband somewhere in that Brooklyn penthouse; there’s a man who gets to touch her whenever he wants. And I have a wife. In fact, I have two wives: one who is a ghost I can’t find, and the other who is just a placeholder sleeping in a separate wing of my house. If I don’t leave Vegas tonight, right this second, I might go back down to that hallway, find her, and fuck her until she forgets she ever had a husband. I’ll forget she has a son. I’ll forget I have a name to protect. I’ll burn the whole Windsor legacy down just to see her cum p>

Zane leaned against the doorframe, his gaze steady and calculating. He didn’t offer me a lecture on morality. He knew me better than that. “Maybe you should just fuck her, Julian,” he said, his voice dropping to a pragmatic level. “Maybe you should just get it out of your system. Fuck her and see if you still crave her afterward. Maybe you’re just stuck on the fact that Katia was your fiancée before the switch happened. Maybe it’s not love, or even lust—maybe it’s just the ego of a man who hates losing what was originally his p>

I wanted to believe him. I desperately wanted to believe that if I just had her once, the fever would break. I wanted to believe that she was just a variable I hadn’t solved yet. But as I closed my eyes, all I could see was the way she looked at me in that hallway—the defiance, the hunger, the way her body melted into mine as if we were two halves of a broken soul.

“I want to believe that’s the truth,” I whispered, the admission tasting like ash in my mouth. “I really do. But Zane… every time I touch myself, every time I close my eyes in the dark of my own room, I’m thinking of her. And when I do, I cum like a man who hasn’t felt a woman’s touch in a lifetime. It’s not a craving, Zane. It’s a haunting p>

“Then we leave,” Zane said, his expression turning serious. “Before you do something that even the Windsor lawyers can’t fix p>

The ride to the airfield was a blur of high-speed turns and oppressive silence. The desert air was turning grey, the first hint of dawn beginning to bleed over the horizon. By the time we reached the private hangar, the clock on the dashboard read 4:45 AM.

The Gulfstream sat on the tarmac, a sleek, silver predator waiting to carry me back to the cage I called a life. I climbed the stairs without looking back at the city of sin. I didn’t want the lights. I didn’t want the noise. I wanted the cold, sterile isolation of the sky.

As the engines roared to life at 5:00 AM, I slumped into my leather seat, staring out the window as the wheels left the ground. Vegas began to shrink beneath us, the neon flickering out like dying embers.

Zane sat opposite me, pouring two glasses of heavy, expensive bourbon. He didn’t say a word as he handed one to me. He knew I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

I took a long, burning swallow of the alcohol, feeling it settle in my stomach, but it did nothing to dull the ache in my lower body or the image of Katia standing against that wall or even my cock pressed against her thighs. I was returning to Manhattan, to a boardroom where I would have to look her in the eye and pretend her taste wasn’t still on my tongue. I was returning to a mansion where Delia would be waiting with her fake smiles and her mother’s schemes.

I leaned my head back against the headrest, closing my eyes as the plane leveled out at thirty thousand feet. I was Julian Windsor. I was the head of an empire. I was a man who won every race and closed every deal.

But as the sun began to rise over the Atlantic, hitting the wings of the plane with a blinding, golden light, I knew the truth. I was flying away as fast as a jet could carry me, but I wasn’t escaping anything. I was just taking the fire with me.

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