Chapter 260

[ 1,010 words ]

Julian’s POV

My glass did not survive the broadcast.

I was sitting in my biometric-locked study at the Windsor estate, a heavy crystal tumbler of neat, single-malt scotch in my hand, when the screen flickered. I wasn’t alone. Zane was leaning against the mahogany bookcase near the window, a folder of the Grand Prix logistics in his hands, his face tight with the same silent, simmering frustration that had been keeping both of us awake for forty-eight hours.

We had been reviewing the server access logs that Marcus had compiled, tracing the secure WEG node that had leaked the booking number. We were systematically hunting the leak. We were looking for the digital throat to cut.

Then, the high-definition monitor on the wall went black for a fraction of a second.

A red bulletin bar slashed across the bottom. A live feed from London.

“Julian,” Zane said, his voice dropping to a low, warning register as he tapped the folder against his thigh. “Look at the screen p>

I didn’t need him to tell me. My eyes were already locked onto the broadcast.

A man stood at a polished podium in a ballroom at the Whitmore Hotel in London. Dark, impeccable suit. Sharp, clean shoulders. The controlled, heavy bearing of a billionaire who ran his empire like a military campaign and expected every room he walked into to yield to his presence.

Jude Wolfe.

I knew him. We had crossed paths on the European factory racing circuits for five years. He was cold, calculated, and completely ruthless. But under normal circumstances, I didn’t care about his pedigree, I didn’t care about Wolfe Motorsport, and I didn’t care about whatever high-stakes games he played on the UK tracks.

I cared about what came out of his mouth.

“My name is Jude Wolfe,” his voice came through the high-fidelity speakers of my study, low, steady, and completely unhurried. The British accent carried that heavy, deliberate weight of a man who did not need volume to command absolute silence. “For those of you who do not know who I am—you will p>

I set the glass down on the mahogany desk, but my fingers didn’t release the crystal. The ice clinked against the sides, a sharp, metallic sound in the quiet room. Beside me, I heard Zane stop breathing.

“Katia Kensington is my wife,” Jude Wolfe said, looking directly into the camera lens with a calm, unblinking certainty. “She has been my wife for seven years. The marriage is legal, registered, and entirely real p>

The crystal shattered in my hand.

I didn’t squeeze it slowly. I crushed it. The heavy, double-walled tumbler fractured under the sudden, violent torque of my grip, the glass biting deep into my palm, the shards slicing through my skin like paper. The single-malt scotch splashed across the polished wood of my desk, mixing instantly with the dark, heavy red of my blood.

I didn’t feel the cuts. I didn’t feel the alcohol burning the fresh, deep gash in my palm.

I stood up from my leather chair, my chest expanding with a slow, violent breath that tasted like pure iron. My vision went black at the edges, my heart thundering against my ribs with the physical, territorial rage of an apex predator that had just watched another beast step into his den and put his hands on what belonged to him.

My wife.

He had said the words. He had said them to two hundred journalists, to every major outlet in the US and the UK, to the entire fucking world.

Jude Wolfe had just claimed Katia.

The rage in my chest was hot, heavy, and completely nuclear. It was a suffocating pressure that made my knuckles turn white. I was her husband. Katia was mine, and she had been mine since forever. I had the real, legally binding marriage certificate locked in the heavy, biometric safe behind the painting on my study wall. The paper had originally been signed with our aliases—Jules and Kat—but the moment I found out she was the ghost wife I had spent years searching for, I had my lawyers legally rectify it.

I had slipped the binding document into a stack of corporate filings, and she had signed her actual, legal name to it without ever realizing what she was sealing. She didn’t know she was legally, irreversibly bound to me. I was the father of her son. I was the man who had spent the last several weeks driving his cock deep into her tight, wet pussy in her office and on my bed until she was screaming my name into the pillows.

I was Jules. I was her real husband.

And this British motherfucker had just stood at a podium in London and told the entire world she belonged to him. He was using my secret. He knew about the hidden marriage—his intelligence network was too good not to have flagged the blank space on her ledger—and he had taken the one space that belonged entirely to me and written his own name in it. It was a massive, high-stakes power move to claim her and to drag my territory right out from under my face.

And Katia had no idea. She was probably in her office right now, watching this broadcast, believing that the man she had married—the man she had been waiting for, the man who had left her with a ring and a pregnancy—had finally come back for her. She was going to think Jude Wolfe was her husband.

“Julian,” Zane’s voice cut through the dark, rushing static in my head.

He had crossed the room in two strides. He didn’t look at the screen. He was looking at my hand, at the blood and scotch dripping steadily off my knuckles onto the expensive Persian rug. He didn’t try to touch me. He knew better than to get within arm’s reach of me when my eyes were that dark.

“Your hand,” Zane said, his voice flat, trying to inject some sanity into the air. “You’re bleeding through your fingers p>

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