Page 131 of Dark Billionaire Stalker
I get out of the car. The night air is cold, sharp with the promise of winter. I wrap my coat tighter and walk toward the door.
It opens before I reach it.
He's standing in the entrance, backlit by the warm glow of the foyer. He's wearing the same clothes from earlier—dark shirt, dark trousers—but something about him seems different. Stripped down. Like he's shed some layer of armor I didn't even know he was wearing.
"Poppy." My name in his mouth, soft as a prayer.
"I came back."
"I see that."
We stand there, separated by ten feet of stone steps and twenty-five years of tangled history. I don't know who's supposed to move first. I don't know if there are rules for a moment like this.
"Can I come in?" I finally ask.
He steps aside without a word.
***
We end up in the study—his domain, the room where I first saw him kill a man. It feels appropriate somehow, returning to the place where everything started. The scene of the original crime.
Gabriel pours two glasses of whiskey, but doesn't drink his. He just holds it, standing by the fireplace, watching me with those unreadable eyes.
"You went to your mother," he says. Not a question.
"Yes. She told me everything. About Dwayne, about how they met, about why she ran." I take a breath. "Dwayne used to talk about families like yours—powerful people, untouchable people. She's been afraid of that world her entire life."
"And now her daughter is in the middle of it."
I don't respond to that. Not yet. There's too much else to say first.
"Tell me about Dwayne."
The name lands between us like a stone in still water. I watch the ripples spread across his composure—the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his hands curl into fists before deliberately relaxing.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything. Not the facts—I have those. Zach was very thorough." I move closer, drawn by something I can't name. "I want to know what it was like. How it started. How it ended. I want to understand what he did to you, and what it turned you into."
Gabriel is silent for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is flat, detached—the voice of someone describing events that happened to a stranger.
"I was fourteen when I started at St. Augustine's. My father sent me there because it was prestigious, connected, a pipeline to the right universities and the right social circles. He didn't know about the Brotherhood's involvement with the school. Or maybe he did, and he didn't care." A pause. "I prefer to believe he didn't know."
"And Dwayne?"
"He was my English teacher. Young, charismatic, beloved by students and faculty alike. He had a gift for identifying the vulnerable ones—the boys who were isolated, insecure, desperate for approval." His mouth twists. "I was all three. My mother had just died. My father was distant, consumed bybusiness and Brotherhood politics. My brothers were strangers to me. I was lonely in a way I didn't have words for."
I think of the boy he must have been—grieving, abandoned, ripe for exploitation. My heart cracks along old fault lines.
"He started with attention. Praise. Making me feel special, seen, valued. And then, once I was dependent on his approval, the cruelty began. Small at first—cutting remarks, public humiliations, impossible standards. Then worse. He knew exactly how to break someone down, how to make you feel worthless and desperate for his approval at the same time." He looks at me then, and for the first time, I see the child he was beneath the man he became.
"How did it end?"
"I found his journal." The words come harder now, dragged up from somewhere deep. "He wrote about all of us—his 'special students.' Detailed accounts of what he did, what he planned to do, how he selected his victims. Reading it was like... like seeing myself from the outside for the first time. Seeing how carefully he'd manipulated me, how little any of it had to do with who I actually was."
"You confronted him."
"I killed him." No hesitation, no softening. "I killed him while he begged for his life. I was sixteen years old, and I watched the light leave his eyes, and I feltnothing. No guilt, no horror, no regret. Just... silence. The first peace I'd known in two years."
