Chapter 147

[ 1,418 words ]

Delia’s POV

The investigator sent the report on a Thursday morning.

I read it at the kitchen table with coffee I didn’t touch.

He had found nothing on the financial history. Katia’s money trail before IG Technologies went public was a wall — clean, sealed, professionally maintained. He had hit it from four different angles and got nowhere. Whatever funded those early years was buried deep enough that he would need significantly more time and significantly more money to find it.

That was the bad news.

The good news was everything else.

He had photographs. Forty-three of them, taken over three weeks by a contact he used for surveillance work. Katia and Julian at the Windsor family lunch. Katia and Julian at a child’s birthday party, standing close, her laughing at something he said. Katia leaving the WEG building on a Tuesday afternoon, Julian walking her to her car, the two of them talking in the street for eleven minutes before she got in.

Eleven minutes. He had timed it.

There was a photograph from the birthday party that I kept coming back to. Julian was crouched down talking to Aiden, and Katia was standing a few feet away watching them with an expression I had never seen on her face. I had spent twenty years watching my sister perform composure. That was not composure. That was something she was not managing at all.

I put that photograph to the side.

The investigator had also found Sam.

Not who Sam was — Sam’s personal history was apparently as clean as Katia’s financial records, which in itself was suspicious enough to be interesting. What he had found was the trail Sam left behind her. Multiple shell companies registered across four jurisdictions. Encrypted communication channels. Financial movements that ran through so many layers that even his contact with access to banking records couldn’t get to the bottom of them.

Ms Kensington operates behind a significant layer of protection managed almost entirely by her assistant, the report said. The assistant appears to manage both legitimate business operations and activities deliberately structured to avoid visibility. The nature of those activities is unclear, but the infrastructure surrounding them is professional and extensive.

I read that paragraph three times.

Activities structured to avoid visibility.

Sam had always been everywhere Katia was. Every event, every meeting, every time something needed managing. I had always thought of her as a very competent assistant. I was starting to think she was something considerably more than that.

Then there were the Instagram posts.

My investigator had done something I hadn’t thought to do. He had cross-referenced the dates and locations of Julian’s posts against Katia’s public schedule.

France — Julian posted from Antibes the same week Katia was there for a European tech forum.

Dubai shadows — Julian posted from the desert the same week Katia’s team was in Dubai for the IG expansion launch.

The Burj Khalifa dinner — Julian posted a picture of a dinner table for two from the highest restaurant in the world on a night when Katia was staying three floors below him in the same hotel.

Every single post. Every one of them corresponded to a time and place where Katia was present.

I sat at the kitchen table for a long time.

I was not a fool. I had never been a fool. I had simply been too close to something to see its full shape, and now that I was stepping back, I could see it clearly, and it was infuriating and humiliating, and it made the rejection from Julian’s hallway with the rose petals feel like a small wound compared to what was in front of me now.

He had been posting her.

All this time. The hands in France, the shadows in the desert, the dinner for two with the woman’s necklace visible in the corner of the frame. The whole world had been asking who she was, and the answer had been sitting in my family’s living room eating Sunday lunch and pretending not to look at my husband.

My husband, who had told me to my face that I was not his type.

My husband, who had apparently been documenting his time with my sister on social media for months.

I closed the report.

I opened my laptop.

I created a new document, and I titled it simply: What I Know.

I started writing.

Not everything — not yet. I wasn’t ready to use everything yet. But I wrote down what I had. The photographs. Sam’s shadow operations. The Instagram timeline. The eleven minutes in the street.

And at the bottom of the page, in a separate section, I wrote two names.

Victor Hale.

Private investigator — continue.

Victor had resources I didn’t have. Victor had access and contacts and the kind of infrastructure that could crack what my investigator couldn’t. And Victor, I had understood very clearly that night in his penthouse, wanted something from the world that Julian Windsor occupied.

We wanted the same things for different reasons.

That made us useful to each other.

I saved the document. I closed the laptop.

I picked up my coffee. It was cold. I drank it anyway.

I sat there for another few minutes thinking about the birthday party photograph. Katia watching Julian with Aiden. That expression on her face. I had looked at it so many times I had it memorised.

The thing that bothered me most was not that Julian wanted her. I had known that for months. What bothered me was that she was letting it happen. Katia, who had spent six years building walls around herself so high that even our parents couldn’t get through them. Katia, who had never once in all the family events and charity galas and business dinners brought a man with her or mentioned one or given anyone the faintest indication that she was interested in anything except her company and her son.

Katia, who was apparently letting Julian Windsor take her to the desert and post her shadow on his Instagram.

She knew he was my husband. She had sat at my mother’s table and eaten Sunday lunch across from me, and she knew. And she had let it happen anyway.

That was what I could not forgive.

Not Julian — Julian had never pretended to want me and had never offered me anything except a contract and a cold corridor and a glass of wine poured for himself. He had been honest about what this was from the beginning, brutally so, and I had walked in with my eyes open.

But Katia.

My sister had walked into this with her eyes open too.

I stood up from the table. I washed my cup and dried it and put it back in the cupboard. Small things. Ordinary things. The kind of things you did when you needed your hands to be busy while your head was working.

Victor had texted me twice since the night at the Aman. Both times he was just checking in, which was his way of keeping the door open without demanding anything. He was patient. He was strategic. He moved at his own pace, and he did not rush things that benefited from not being rushed.

I had not replied to either message.

I was going to reply today.

Not with everything. Not yet. I was not going to hand Victor a loaded weapon before I understood exactly what he was going to do with it. But I was going to open the conversation. I was going to let him know that I had information and that I was prepared to share it selectively with the right person at the right time.

And in return I wanted something.

I wanted leverage. Not over Julian – I had stopped wanting anything from Julian. I wanted leverage over the situation. Over the narrative. Over the version of events that was going to come out eventually because things like this always came out eventually, and when it did, I was not going to be the pathetic discarded wife standing in the wreckage. I was going to be the woman who had seen it coming and had positioned herself accordingly.

I picked up my phone.

I typed Victor’s name.

I wrote: I have something you’ll find interesting.’ Dinner this week.

I sent it before I could change my mind.

His reply came in less than a minute.

Thursday. Aman. 8pm.

I put the phone down.

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