Chapter 132

[ 992 words ]

Delia’s POV

I sat on the edge of the hotel bed and looked at the wall for ten minutes.

Then I got up, poured myself a drink from the minibar, and sat back down.

The clip had four hundred thousand views. I had made the mistake of checking. The comments were exactly what you would expect from people who spent their lives on racing forums and had just watched someone claim to be their hero and then fail to identify the car she supposedly drove.

Doesn’t even know the model. Absolute joke.

Someone’s wife playing dress-up. Embarrassing.

Fake Catwoman. Fake Windsor wife. What’s real about this woman?

That last one hit differently.

I put my phone face down and drank my drink and thought about what had gone wrong.

The problem was simple. I had thought Catwoman was a persona, a character someone had built and was performing. Helmet, suit, attitude. Something you could study and replicate if you were smart enough and confident enough. I was both of those things. I had been both of those things my entire life.

I had been wrong.

Catwoman was not a persona. Catwoman was a real racer with real skills who had been doing this for years on real circuits, and the gap between what she did on that track and what I could pretend to know about it was not a gap you could close with confidence and a borrowed suit.

Whoever she was, she was the real thing.

Which meant she was someone.

Which meant she existed somewhere in the world with a name and a face and a life that I could find if I looked hard enough.

I poured another drink.

Julian was obsessed with Catwoman. He had been for years; the file on his laptop had made that clear. He was also, increasingly obviously, obsessed with Katia. Two obsessions. One man. I had been assuming they were separate things.

What if they weren’t?

I picked up my phone.

I opened Katia’s public profile. Tech CEO. Forbes list. Harvard. The IG Technologies origin story that every profile told was the same vague way — founded with private investment, early acquisitions, and rapid growth. Nobody had ever broken down where the money actually came from. Katia had never said. No journalist had managed to find it. Julian had tried to access it through a contract clause, and Katia had shut that down in forty-eight hours with a counter-clause so clean it made his legal team look incompetent.

What the hell was she hiding?

She had been thrown out of this family at twenty years old with nothing. Pregnant. No support. And six years later she walks back into New York with a billion-dollar company and a son and a ring on her finger and the specific composure of someone who had survived something and come out the other side stronger than anyone expected.

The ring.

I had noticed it for months. Heavy. The kind of piece that didn’t come from a shop. The kind of piece that came from somewhere specific, from someone specific, for a reason.

Katia had a husband. Nobody knew who he was. She had never said. Gail didn’t know. Her own parents didn’t know. The man was a complete ghost — no name, no face, no record of anyone ever meeting him or knowing about him or being able to confirm he existed at all.

But the ring existed, which means he existed.

And if he existed, where the hell had he come from? And how much money did he have? Because the seed funding for IG Technologies had to come from somewhere, and it hadn’t come from the Kensingtons, and it hadn’t come from a bank, and it hadn’t come from nowhere.

It had come from him.

The mysterious husband. The one nobody had ever met. The one Katia had apparently acquired during the six years she disappeared and refused to explain.

I set the drink down.

I went to my bag. At the bottom of it, in a zippered inner pocket I never used for anything else, was a phone. Basic, prepaid, untraceable. Mama had given it to me eight months ago when things with Julian started going sideways. For emergencies, she had said. Don’t use it unless you have to.

I had never used it.

I took it out. Turned it on. The battery was at sixty per cent; Mama had charged it recently, which meant she had been thinking about emergencies too.

I found the number. One contact saved under a first name only. A private investigator Mama had used twice before for things that did not need to be discussed openly.

I called.

He answered on the third ring.

“I have three questions,” I said. “And I need the answers before I get back to New York p>

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Katia Kensington. I want to know who her husband is. I want to know where the seed money for IG Technologies came from. And I want to know the full story of how that company started — not the press version, the real one p>

He didn’t answer right away, and then he spoke. “Timeline p>

“Yesterday,” I said. “And be thorough. There is something in her history that nobody has found yet, and I need you to find it p>

“I’ll need a retainer p>

I gave him a number. He accepted it.

I hung up.

I sat in the Dubai hotel room with the burner phone in my hand and thought about my sister. About the ring on her finger and the company she wouldn’t explain and the husband nobody had ever met and Julian’s obsession that I was starting to think pointed at the same person from two different directions.

I didn’t have proof of anything.

But I had questions. Good ones. The kind that had answers if you looked in the right places.

And I had just hired someone to look.

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