Chapter 99

[ 1,127 words ]

Katia’s POV

The email arrived on a Friday afternoon buried in the routine correspondence between the WEG and IG legal teams, the kind of thing that moved between companies at the administrative level and was supposed to feel like paperwork. Standard contract review language. Polite. Professional. The sort of thing that could be dismissed as routine by anyone who wasn’t paying close attention.

Sam was always paying close attention.

She appeared in my doorway at four thirty with her tablet and the specific expression she wore when something required my full attention before the weekend.

“WEG’s legal team sent a contract amendment request,” she said. “Clause fourteen, subsection C. Background verification provision p>

I held out my hand for the tablet. She gave it to me.

I read the clause.

Then I read it again.

It was written in the careful, layered language of corporate legal documents — designed to sound administrative, to feel like standard due diligence, to slot into a contract review without triggering alarm in anyone who read it quickly and trusted the framing. Background verification. Asset documentation. Personal financial history. Access to records pertaining to the founding and early capitalisation of IG Technologies.

I set the tablet down on my desk.

“How unusual is this clause?” I asked.

“In a standard vendor partnership?” Sam said. “Completely unprecedented. WEG has never requested anything like this in any previous contract.” She paused. “It’s not a legal requirement. It’s not industry standard. It’s not even close to what a background check provision normally looks like.” Another pause. “It’s personal, Kat p>

I knew what it meant. I had known before Sam finished explaining it, before I finished reading it, before she had even walked through the door. Julian had spent four years trying to find out who funded IG Technologies in its earliest years — who the woman behind the company was before she had a name, before she had a public profile, before she walked into a WEG boardroom and sat across from him. He hadn’t found it through investigation. So now he was trying to find it through contract law.

It was, I had to admit, elegant.

It was also not going to work.

“Get Marcus,” I said.

Marcus was on the phone in four minutes. I read him the clause. He was quiet for exactly the time it took him to understand it fully, and then he said: “Counter-clause. The provision is struck entirely. Any further attempts by WEG to access personal financial records or founding documentation outside the direct business scope of the Invisible Shield contract will constitute a material breach, triggering the penalty provisions in section nine p>

“Draft it,” I said. “I want it submitted by end of business today p>

“It’ll be done in an hour p>

I hung up and looked out the window at the late afternoon city. The sun was doing something complicated with the buildings that specific late Friday light that made Manhattan look briefly, improbably golden before it gave way to evening.

Julian had been in his study last night. I didn’t know that. But I knew the timing of this clause submitted the morning after he visited Gail, the morning after whatever conversation had happened in that apartment that I had not been part of and had not been told about. The timing was not coincidental. Julian Windsor did not do coincidences.

Something had shifted for him. I didn’t know what. But something had shifted, and this clause was the result — a move, direct and barely disguised, to access the part of my history that I had kept most carefully contained.

The early years. The racing money. How a twenty-year-old with nothing had funded a Harvard education and a company acquisition simultaneously.

He was looking for the thread that led back to Catwoman.

He wasn’t going to find it in my financial records. I had been careful, extraordinarily careful, for years, about keeping those two worlds structurally separate. But the fact that he was looking at all told me that last night something had moved him from patient surveillance to active reach.

Marcus sent the counter-clause at five forty-seven. I reviewed it, approved it, and had Sam submit it to WEG’s legal team at five fifty-nine.

Then I sat at my desk and waited.

The call came at seven o’clock. Not from WEG’s legal team. Directly from Julian. His name on my screen, personal number, the same one he had used to text me from the bridge.

I answered on the third ring.

“Nice try,” I said.

A pause. Then, low, unexpected, and genuine, he laughed.

It was the same laugh. The one from the simulator. The one from the bar at the Calloway Club. The unguarded one that arrived before he could decide whether to let it in and that told me more about who he actually was than anything he had ever said deliberately.

“Worth a shot,” he said.

“It wasn’t even close p>

“I know.” Another pause. “The counter-clause is well drafted p>

“Marcus is thorough p>

“So are you.” Something in his voice had shifted — not the professional register, not the boardroom register. Something quieter. More direct. “Katia p>

“Julian p>

“I’m going to find it eventually,” he said. Not a threat. Just a statement of fact, delivered with the calm certainty of a man who had decided something and was letting her know he had decided it.

“You’re welcome to keep trying,” I said.

A silence that lasted exactly long enough to mean something.

“Dubai,” he said finally. “Five weeks p>

“I know,” I said.

“I’ll see you there p>

“You will,” I said. And hung up.

I set the phone down on the desk.

I looked at it.

My hands were shaking.

Not with fear — I needed to be clear about that, even just to myself. Not with fear. With the specific, electric, slightly maddening sensation of someone who had just had a conversation that operated on four levels simultaneously and had navigated all four of them correctly and was now sitting alone with the adrenaline of it and the knowledge that Julian Windsor had just told her, as plainly as he ever told anyone anything, that he was coming for her.

And that the most alarming thing about that was not that she wanted to stop him.

I stood up. I went to the window. The golden light had gone. Manhattan was evening, now dark and glittering and completely indifferent.

I pressed my forehead lightly against the cool glass.

Five weeks until Dubai.

Five weeks.

I went back to my desk and opened the Dubai logistics brief and worked until nine o’clock with the focused, deliberate attention of someone who had decided that the best response to being hunted was to be very, very prepared.

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