Chapter 259

[ 1,452 words ]

Katia’s POV

I had watched it four times.

The broadcast had cut into regular programming at nine seventeen PM. Sam had been standing at my desk when it happened, both of us mid-sentence about the Grand Prix security protocols, and then her phone had buzzed and she had looked at the screen and said Katia in a voice that made me stop talking immediately.

We had watched it on the office television.

A man at a podium. Dark suit. British accent, low and unhurried, the kind of voice that did not need volume because it had weight. He had looked directly at the cameras with the calm, total certainty of someone who had decided something and was not interested in discussing it.

My name is Jude Wolfe.

Katia Kensington is my wife.

I had stood in front of the television at nine twenty-three PM and felt the floor tilt slightly under my feet.

Not because of the footage. The footage was extraordinary—the original, unedited forty-seven seconds of what had actually happened on that rooftop—and it was going to clear my name, and I understood that, and I was grateful for it in the abstract way you were grateful for things when your brain had stopped processing the emotional layer of information.

Not because of the murder charge being dismantled.

Because of the four words.

Katia Kensington is my wife.

Seven years.

Seven years and not a word. Not a phone call, not a letter, not a single attempt to find me or reach me or acknowledge that a marriage certificate with two aliases existed. Seven years of me carrying a ring in a box by my bed and telling Grandma Celeste I did not know my husband’s name and building a company and raising a son and constructing an entire life around the absence of a man who had apparently been—what? Existing somewhere? Running a company? Racing on UK circuits?

Watching?

Why now?

That was the question that had been sitting in my chest since nine seventeen PM and had not moved. Why now? Why not six years ago when I came back to Brooklyn pregnant and alone? Why not three years ago when IG Technologies first made the news? Why not last year when I came back to New York and my name was everywhere?

Why now, when I had fallen so completely for a man I was not supposed to fall for, when Julian Windsor had been sleeping in my bed for weeks and I had sat in a car outside the Windsor estate and told Sam it was too late and meant it?

Why now, when it was the worst possible time for a husband to appear?

Sam walked in at ten thirty.

I was sitting at my desk in the dark. I had not turned on the office lights after the broadcast. I had sat in the blue glow of the city through the windows and the standby light of the television, and I had not moved.

Sam did not turn on the lights either. She sat down across from me and looked at my face.

“How are you feeling?” she said.

I looked at her.

“Numb,” I said.

Sam nodded slowly. She did not say anything immediately. She sat with it the way she sat with difficult things—present, patient, not filling the silence with noise.

“I have known you since you were eighteen years old,” she said finally. “I have never seen you like this. Not when your mother threw you out. Not when you were building IG from nothing with a newborn. Not even when the Victor lawsuit hit.” She looked at me. “Is it because of your husband p>

I did not hide from Sam.

I could hide from the world. I had been hiding from the world in various ways since I was twenty years old, and I was very good at it. But Sam had been there for all of it—the Vegas trip, the pregnancy, the Brooklyn years, the return, Julian, all of it—and she had a way of knowing things that made hiding from her feel like a waste of energy.

“Yes,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

I looked at the window.

“I do not know,” I said. “I do not know who he is. I do not know why he appeared tonight of all the nights he could have appeared. I do not know what he knows. I do not know—” I stopped. Breathed. “His name is Jude, Sam. The man I married was called Jules. Those are not the same names p>

Sam was quiet for a moment.

“They are close,” she said.

“They are not the same,” I said. “Jules is Jules. Jude is Jude. What if he is not even—” I stopped again. “What if someone saw an opportunity in the situation tonight and decided to use it? A powerful man with his own reasons for wanting to be connected to this p>

“His company had the backup server contract,” Sam said. “That is not fabricated. We can verify it. The footage is real—we know that because it matches what we already had forensically. He had the original.” She paused. “And Katia.” She leaned forward slightly. “Jude Wolfe was at the underground racing circuit in Las Vegas seven years ago. I found a reference to a Wolfe Motorsport executive in the circuit records from that event. He was there that night p>

I looked at her.

She held my gaze.

“So maybe,” she said quietly, “he is your husband after all p>

The office was very quiet.

I turned back to the window.

Jude Wolfe. Who had been at the circuit in Las Vegas seven years ago? Who had the backup footage that cleared my name? Who had stood in front of cameras in a hotel ballroom and said Katia Kensington is my wife with the calm certainty of a man stating a fact he had been carrying for a long time.

I should have been thinking about him since he is my husband, but no, I was thinking about Julian.

Even now, with Sam sitting across from me and my husband’s face on the television and my name cleared of a murder charge and the Grand Prix in less than twelve hours—I was thinking about Julian Windsor. About the way he had said, “I have you on a rooftop” when my legs had stopped working. About the wardrobe full of clothes in my size that he had stocked before I ever spent the night. About seven mornings of coffee already made and the seatbelt checked twice, and you know exactly who you are to me, said in the dark of a bedroom I had started to think of as mine.

About the way he fucks me and the way my pussy wants more of his punishments.

About the way I felt when he looked at me.

There was a man on a television screen who might be my husband, and I could not stop thinking about someone else.

“Sam,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“I have completely fallen for my sister’s husband p>

“I know,” she said again. Softer.

I pressed my fingers to my forehead.

What was I going to do when Jude Wolfe arrived in New York? What was I going to say to a man who had just cleared my name and called me his wife on live television when I had spent the last several weeks in another man’s bed? What would I say to my husband about Julian? What would I say to Julian about my husband?

And underneath all of it, the question I could not answer—the one that was going to keep me awake tonight regardless of the Grand Prix and the murder charge and Jude Wolfe booking a flight across the Atlantic —

What did I actually want?

“The race is in nine hours,” Sam said.

“I know,” I said.

“You need to sleep p>

“I know p>

She stood up and picked up her bag. At the door she stopped.

“For what it’s worth,” she said, “the man who makes you see stars at night—he is not nothing. Whatever happens next.” She paused. “That is not nothing; you might hide, but I know you love him and wish he was the husband, but your husband is back now p>

She left.

I sat in the dark office with the city below me and the television still on standby, and the image of a man at a podium sitting in my chest alongside the image of a different man standing in a corridor at midnight saying, “I sleep where you sleep, Kitten,” and I did not sleep for a very long time.

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