Page 107 of Dark Billionaire Predator

I park behind Josiah's car. Lucy is in the passenger seat, finishing something on her phone—a text to a client, a notefor Monday's session, the small professional maintenance of a woman who carries other people's pain and manages it with the same precision she brings to everything.

"Ready?" I ask.

She looks up. Smiles. The real one. "I've been to your family's house before, Benedict."

"That was different. That was Saturday dinner with the Ambroses. This is—"

"Sunday dinner with my sister and her husband, who happens to be your brother." She puts her phone away. "I think I can manage."

I look at her. The navy coat. The hair she didn't fuss with. The face I've memorized from every angle—through windows, from across rooms, from the distance of a car parked on West 10th Street, and now from the distance of the passenger seat, which is no distance at all. She is beautiful the way she has always been beautiful: not for my benefit, not for anyone's. Just as a fact about the world.

"I love you," I say. Still testing the weight of it. Still finding it heavier than I expected, and more bearable.

"I love you too. Now get out of the car. We're late."

Poppy opens the door before we knock—she has an instinct for arrivals, or she watches from the kitchen window, or both. She hugs Lucy first, which tells me everything about how quickly Lucy has been absorbed into the architecture of this family. Poppy has a genius for absorption. She makes everyone feel like they've been here forever.

"Iris has been asking about you," Poppy tells Lucy, then laughs. "Asking is generous. She's been pointing at the door and sayingLoofor the last twenty minutes."

Lucy laughs. The sound fills the foyer the way the stained glass fills the church—unexpected, warm, coloring everything around it. I watch her follow Poppy toward the kitchen and I stand in the entryway of the house I grew up in and I feel something I don't have a name for. Not happiness exactly. Something more structural. The feeling of a load-bearing wall discovering it's not the only one holding up the house.

Gabriel is in the study. He looks up when I pass the door—the brief, comprehensive assessment of the eldest brother, the man who has been watching me the way I watch everyone else since the day I was born. He sees something in my face. Nods. Doesn't comment. Gabriel's restraint is its own language, and today it's saying:I see you. I see that something has changed. I'll wait until you're ready to tell me what.

I nod back. Continue to the dining room.

Ava is already there. She's setting the table with the efficiency of a woman who has done this enough times to know where the good glasses are kept, moving through the Ambrose dining room with the proprietary ease of a person who has stopped being a guest and started being family. Josiah is behind her, carrying a serving dish, and the two of them navigate the space around each other with the unconscious choreography of a couple who have learned each other's rhythms. She steps left, he steps right. She reaches up, he reaches past. The domestic dance of two people who fit.

Ava sees me. Her expression does something complicated—warmth, wariness, the assessment of a prosecutor who loves her sister and is still deciding whether the youngest Ambrose brother deserves what he's been given. She hasn't decided yet. She may never fully decide. That's fine. Ava's skepticism is a form of love, and I'd rather have her watching me with sharp eyes than trusting me with dull ones.

"Benedict." She says my name the way she says everything—precisely, with full awareness of its weight.

"Ava."

"Lucy's in the kitchen with Poppy and Iris. Something about horses."

"Something is always about horses."

The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile. The beginning of one—the beginning of whatever Ava and I will become to each other, which is something neither of us has a name for yet, but which involves her sister and my brother and the fact that the Anderson women have chosen the Ambrose men and the choosing is, apparently, permanent.

Josiah catches my eye over Ava's shoulder. My brother's face is the same as always—pragmatic, composed, the steady middle son who holds the space between Gabriel's authority and my chaos. But there's something in his expression tonight that I haven't seen before. Something that looks like relief. As if he's been waiting for me to arrive at a place he's already been—the place where you let someone in and it doesn't destroy you—and is glad I finally made it.

Dinner is loud. Not the weighted silence of Brotherhood gatherings or the performative ease of the Saturday dinner where I bruised Lucy's thigh under the table while she held herself together with clinical precision. This is different. This is Iris in her high chair, mashing roast potato into the tray with the focus of a demolitions expert. This is Poppy intercepting a thrown spoon midair without pausing her sentence. This is Gabriel cutting his daughter's food into pieces so small they border on molecular, the man who runs a criminal organization reduced to anxious geometry by a two-year-old's chewing capacity. This is Josiah and Ava arguing about acase—something professional, something neither of them will concede, the argument conducted with the ferocious specificity of two people who respect each other enough to fight fairly.

And Lucy. Lucy in the middle of it—laughing at Gabriel's food preparation, wiping potato off Iris's chin with a napkin, catching Ava's eye across the table with a look I've seen once before, when Ava saidI chose full over safeand Lucy hadn't understood yet what that meant. She understands now. The look between them is the look of two sisters who have both chosen the impossible thing and survived it and are sitting at a table eating roast chicken with the evidence of their choices beside them.

She reaches under the table. Finds my hand. Holds it.

I hold hers back. The hand that I've watched wrap around coffee cups and grip pen caps and touch the spines of books in a shop on a Wednesday afternoon when she didn't know I was watching. The hand I know by surveillance and by love, and the two ways of knowing have finally, improbably, become the same thing.

My father's portrait watches from the landing. Edward Ambrose, the expression that might be pride or might be disappointment. I used to look at that portrait and see the question—the unanswered, unresolvable question of who killed him and why. Now I look at it and see a man who chose silence when he should have spoken, who tolerated when he should have acted, who sat at tables like this one and kept secrets that eventually consumed him.

I will not be that man. I will sit at this table with this woman's hand in mine, and I will be here—not watching from outside, not surveilling from a distance, not standing behind one-way glass cataloging details I'm afraid to touch. Here. Present. Chosen and choosing.

Iris drops a piece of chicken on the floor, looks at it, looks at me, and raises both arms. "Up," she says. The word is a command, not a request. She is her father's daughter.

I pick her up. She settles against my chest with the boneless weight of a toddler who has decided she's done with her chair, and she grabs a fistful of my shirt, and the small hand on my chest is so light it barely registers and so heavy it rearranges everything.

Lucy watches me hold my niece. Her expression does something I don't have a clinical framework for—something soft and fierce and certain. The expression of a woman who is seeing something she wants and is not afraid to want it.