Page 117 of Dark Billionaire Stalker
Sleep doesn't come. Every time I close my eyes, I see Gabriel's face in the garden. The desperation in his expression when I accused him. The way his voice cracked when he saidI was afraid.
Gabriel Ambrose, afraid. The man who kills without remorse, who controls empires, who tied me to his bed andmade me beg—that man was afraid. Of losing me. Of watching me look at him the way I'm looking at him now.
Like I'm a monster, he said.
Is that what I see when I look at him? A monster?
I don't know anymore. I don't know what I see, what I feel, what I want. Everything is tangled together—the horror and the desire, the betrayal and the understanding, the rage and the grief, and something else I refuse to name.
He killed my father.
The words echo in my head, relentless and inescapable. He killed my father. Before I was born, before he knew I existed, Gabriel Ambrose wrapped his hands around Dwayne Thomas's throat and squeezed until the life drained out of him.
And my father deserved it.
That's the part I can't reconcile. The part that makes everything so much more complicated than it should be.
I've read Dwayne's journal entries. Zach made sure of that—showed me the pages that detailed, in my father's own handwriting, the things he did to his students. The boys he targeted. The ways he broke them.
Gabriel was one of those boys. For two years, he suffered at my father's hands.
I try to imagine it—a teenage Gabriel, not yet the predator he would become, trapped in a nightmare he couldn't escape. Powerful family, prestigious school, and a teacher who used his position to torment children who had no one to protect them.
What would I have done in his place? If someone had hurt me like that, and I'd found a moment where I could fight back—what would I have done?
I don't know. I've never been tested like that.
But I understand why he did it. I can even understand why he kept it secret all these years, why he let the Brotherhood cover it up, why he built his life on the foundation of that first kill.
What I can't understand—what I can't forgive—is why he didn't tell me.
He's had days. Days of knowing who I am, who my father was, how our histories are intertwined. Days of looking into my eyes and choosing to stay silent. Days of touching me, fucking me, whispering words of possession and desire, all while carrying a secret that should have been mine to know.
I was trying to find the right words, he said.
There are no right words. That's what I told him, and I meant it. But there are better choices than silence. Better choices than using my body to distract me from the truth.
I curl onto my side, pulling the blanket up to my chin, and try to organize my thoughts.
What do I know for certain?
Gabriel killed my father. That's a fact, undeniable, confirmed by both Zach and Gabriel himself.
My father was a monster. Also a fact, supported by the journal entries, by what Gabriel told me, by the way my mother spent twenty-five years running from his shadow.
Gabriel didn't know who I was when he started watching me. That's harder to verify, but I believe it. The way he reacted when I confronted him—the shock, the desperation—that wasn't the response of a man who's been manipulating me from the beginning. That was the response of a man whose carefully constructed world just collapsed around him.
And he's been hiding the truth from me since he found out. That's the part that burns. Not the kill itself—I can almost understand that, can almost frame it as justice rather than murder. But the lies. The deliberate choice to keep me in the dark.
He doesn't trust me. He said he does, but actions speak louder than words. If he trusted me, he would have told me the truth as soon as he learned it. Instead, he tried to bind me tighter, to make me so dependent on him that I couldn't leave even when I found out.
That's not trust. That's control.
And I'm so fucking tired of being controlled.
***
Dawn creeps through the windows, painting the room in shades of gray and gold.
