Chapter 143

[ 937 words ]

Katia’s POV

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 p>

“Board meeting,” I said. “Nine AM. Everyone p>

“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 committee asked.

“No,” I said. “We are not under threat of acquisition. Victor Hale made a forty per cent stake offer in Dubai which I declined in under two minutes. This article is not a genuine acquisition approach. It is a reputation attack designed to weaken our position before a government contract renewal that both Halo and IG will be bidding on in twelve months.” I looked around the table. “IG is not under threat. IG is about to go to war. Those are two very different things p>

Another silence.

“What do you need?” the chair said.

I told him.

Sam was promoted to chief security officer before she left the meeting. I hired three ex-intelligence analysts by end of day through a firm Sam had used before. Two cybersecurity legal firms were contracted by noon. The false data pipeline through Daniel Osei was already running — Victor was receiving a carefully constructed picture of IG’s vulnerabilities that pointed in entirely the wrong directions.

At two PM I sat down and wrote the statement.

Four paragraphs. No mention of Halo by name. No aggression, no defensiveness, just the surgical dismantling of every implication in the article — the security concerns, the acquisition framing, the anonymous sources. I used the language of complete confidence because I had it. I wrote it in twenty minutes and sent it to Sam, who changed two words and sent it back, and I published it.

Fifty thousand shares in three hours.

I was already in Julian’s car on the way to his office when the number hit forty thousand.

He was already standing when I walked in.

He didn’t offer coffee or pleasantries. He just said, “I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry p>

I had four sentences ready. Precise. The specific language of someone who was furious and had decided that cold was more effective than heat.

I didn’t use any of them.

Because he crossed the room, and I didn’t move back, and his hand came to my jaw firm, not gentle, and his mouth came down on mine hard. His tongue pushing past my lips and my hands grabbing his shirt and pulling him closer when everything rational said don’t.

He kissed me like he was making a point.

I forgot what I was angry about.

I forgot his assistant was twenty feet away on the other side of the glass door. I forgot we were in his office at three in the afternoon. I forgot everything except his mouth and his hands and the fact that I was kissing him back just as hard.

He pulled back first, his forehead against mine. We were both breathing hard.

Neither of us moved for three seconds.

“I love you,” he said. “I know the timing is wrong and I know everything about this is complicated and I know you have a hundred reasons to walk out of this office right now. But I need you to know that p>

I looked at him.

My chest did something I didn’t have a name for. Something that hurt in the way that things hurt when they were true and you had been trying not to let them be true for a very long time.

“Julian,” I said. “You are married to my sister p>

“I know p>

“She is my sister. Whatever the arrangement is, whatever it isn’t, she is still my sister, and you are still her husband, and this—” I stopped. Started again. “This is not simple p>

“No,” he said. “It isn’t p>

“Then how p>

“That will change,” he said; his voice was steady. Completely certain. The certainty of a man who had made a decision and was not going to revisit it. “The arrangement with Delia — I’m going to end it. Properly.” He looked at me directly. “I should have done it before Dubai. I knew before Dubai that I needed to do it p>

I looked at him for a long time.

“You can’t promise that,” I said.

“I just did p>

“Julian p>

He kissed me again.

Not hard this time. Slower. The kind of kiss that had nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with saying something that words were not quite enough for. His hands came up to my face, and he kissed me like I was something he was not going to let go of, and I felt it — all of it, every month of boardrooms and charged silences and almost-moments and the desert and the balloon and the Burj Khalifa, all of it landing at once in the warmth of his mouth on mine.

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