Chapter 229

[ 1,065 words ]

Katia’s POV

“I have spent a year being accused of something,” I said. “At every dinner. Every family event. Every conversation you have managed to insert yourself into. You have been building a case against me with no evidence and no facts and all the energy you should have been putting into your marriage.” I stood up. “So I will ask you one more time. Do you have anything concrete? Any proof? Any single thing you can put on this desk right now that confirms what I am actually fucking your husband p>

Delia looked at me.

The room was very quiet.

She had nothing. I could see it — the absence of it sitting in her expression like a gap where something should have been.

“That is what I thought,” I said. “Now get out of my office p>

“This is not over,” she said.

“It is for today,” I said. “Get out, Delia p>

She looked at me for a long moment. The look of a woman deciding whether to say the next thing.

She decided against it.

She turned.

She walked to the door.

She stopped with her hand on the handle.

“He is going to hurt you,” she said quietly. “Whatever you think is happening, he is going to hurt you p>

I looked at my desk.

“Goodbye, Delia,” I said.

She left.

I sat in the silence of my office for a moment. Then I picked up my phone and typed one message.

To Sam: Send security the footage from the lobby. I want to know how she got past reception.

I put the phone down.

I picked up my pen and went back to the quarterly projections.

I wore the grey suit.

Not because it was a power suit or because I had thought about what message it sent. I wore it because it was the first thing I reached for that morning, and I had stopped overthinking my wardrobe six months ago when I realized that the kind of woman who spent forty minutes deciding what to wear to destroy someone in court was not the kind of woman I wanted to be.

Sam was already in the lobby when I came down.

She handed me coffee without being asked. We did not speak on the drive over. There was nothing to say that had not already been said in the months of preparation that had led to this morning—the counter-filing, the fraud complaint, and the evidence that Marcus had assembled like a man who genuinely enjoyed being right.

The courthouse was cold the way courthouses always were. That institutional cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the weight of what happened inside them.

Victor was already there.

I saw him across the lobby. He was in a suit that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, and he was standing with his legal team looking like a man who had done this before and expected to do it again. Confident. That was the word. The kind of confidence that came from years of walking into rooms and having them rearrange themselves around you.

He saw me and smiled, but I looked away.

Marcus had been building this case for eight months.

The judge was a woman in her late fifties with the expression of someone who had heard every version of every story and was not going to be impressed by any of them. She called the room to order at nine fifteen, and the thing began.

Victor’s attorney opened first. Forty minutes of carefully constructed narrative—the IP, the startup, the years of development, and the acquisition that had taken what rightfully belonged to his client. He was good. I will give him that. He had a voice that made things sound reasonable even when they were not, and he used it well.

Then Marcus stood up.

Marcus did not have a voice like that. Marcus had something better. He had the documents.

The dissolved startup. Filed fourteen months before my acquisition of Meridian. A government regulatory filing showing the IP transferred out of Victor’s entity—transferred, not stolen; transferred by Victor himself as part of a compliance obligation fourteen months before I ever touched the company.

The timestamp discrepancy. The fabricated evidence. The document that Victor’s team had submitted as proof of ownership that had been created after the fact—and Marcus had the metadata to prove it, the forensic analysis, and the chain of custody showing exactly when the file had been made and how it differed from the date it claimed to carry.

The room had a quality to it when truth landed that way. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just the quiet of a space where something had been decided and everyone in it understood that the deciding had happened.

Victor’s attorney asked for a recess.

The judge denied it.

By noon it was over.

The IP claim was thrown out. Entirely. The judge did not mince words: fabricated evidence, fraudulent filing, and a deliberate attempt to damage a competitor through the court system. She used the word “deliberate” three times. She looked at Victor when she said it.

Victor did not look back at her.

The criminal fraud referral was filed before the afternoon session began. I sat in the gallery and watched Victor Hale, ex-MI6 and CEO of Halo Systems, the man who had spent eighteen months trying to dismantle everything I built, sit at his table while his attorney leaned over and spoke quietly into his ear, and whatever the attorney said did not make Victor’s expression change at all.

He just sat there.

Marcus came and sat beside me during the break.

“It’s done,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“The criminal charges will take longer,” he said. “But the civil case is finished. He has nothing left to come at you with on this front p>

I nodded.

I looked across the courtroom at Victor.

He was still sitting very still. And then, as if he felt my eyes on him, he turned. He looked at me across the courtroom with the dark, wired gaze that I had seen across boardroom tables and dinner tables and in the lobby of a hotel in Dubai. The look of a man who had built something and was watching it come apart and was already, somewhere behind his eyes, calculating what came next.

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