Page 17 of Dark Billionaire Predator

If I see him again—and some part of me, the part I trust least and understand best, knows I will—I'm going to be ready. Not afraid. Not hypervigilant. Ready. I'm going to sit across from him with good light and steady hands and I'm going to read him the way I read everyone. Layer by layer. Defense by defense. Until I find the thing at the center that he's working so hard to hide.

And then I'll decide whether to run from it or toward it.

I lie in the dark. The building settles. The radiator ticks. Outside, the city murmurs its endless, indifferent lullaby.

For the first time since Tuesday, the feeling of being watched doesn't frighten me.

It focuses me.

Chapter 6 - Benedict

I'm parked on West 10th Street at eight in the morning, and I've been here since six.

This is the third day in a row. The street encounter didn't slow me down—it accelerated everything. Before, I was watching from a distance. Mapping the external architecture of her life. Maintaining the operational discipline that keeps surveillance productive and contained.

That's over now.

Something shifted on Tuesday night. Standing ten feet from Lucy Anderson in the dark, hearing her voice directed at me for the first time, watching the way her body processed my presence—the tightening, the keys between her fingers, the fear that moved through her like weather—something changed in the machinery of my obsession, and the gears that were turning at one speed are now turning at another.

I can't go back to distance. Wednesday, I made it to noon before I was in the car. Thursday, I didn't make it to ten. This morning, I didn't try. I was dressed and driving before the sun came up, pulled onto her block while the streetlights were still on, and I've been sitting here watching the blue door like a man waiting for church to open.

She came out at seven-fifteen. Same time. Same navy coat. Same low knot exposing the line of her neck. But she paused on the stoop longer than usual—three seconds, maybe four—and looked up and down the street before she started walking. Scanning. Checking the parked cars, the doorways, the shadows between buildings.

She's looking for me.

She doesn't know that's what she's doing. She'll tell herself it's hypervigilance, a residual stress response, the nervous system running hot after a perceived threat. She'll diagnose it, contextualize it, file it in the clinical framework that lets her understand everything except the thing that's actually happening to her.

But I know what she's doing. She's looking for me. And the fact that she didn't find me—because I'm in a different car today, a dark gray sedan, parked sixty feet farther down the block than my usual position—doesn't change the fact that she looked.

I watch her walk to the coffee shop. Watch her come out with the latte. Watch her disappear into the office building on 10th Street. And then I sit in the car for another hour, running numbers on a dead man's financial statements, because the investigation doesn't stop just because every cell in my body would rather be watching her window.

Dominic St. Croix's money. I've been grinding through shell companies and offshore transfers, and what I'm finding is mostly noise. But there's a thread—a series of monthly payments, small enough to be invisible in the larger flow, going to an entity I can't trace. They started thirty-four years ago and stopped when Dominic died. Twenty-nine years of payments to a ghost.

I write it down. Pin it to the wall in my head, next to the October 14th meeting and the too-fast cancer and the sons who won't talk about their father.

Then I close the laptop, because Lucy's eleven o'clock just arrived—a woman in a long coat who pauses at the door the way first-time clients always do, gathering courage—and watchingthe building while it holds Lucy inside it is better than any financial statement I've ever read.

***

The idea builds through the morning, assembling itself from parts while I sit in the car and wait.

She's at work. She'll be at work until six, maybe later—she often stays to write chart notes after her last client. Her apartment is empty. Has been empty since seven-fifteen, when she walked out the blue door and looked up and down the street and didn't see me.

Eight hours. Her apartment. Empty.

I know I'm going to do it before I've consciously decided. The recognition arrives the way the red arrives before a kill—not as a thought but as a certainty, a fait accompli that my rational mind is just now catching up to. I'm going to go into her apartment. I'm going to stand in her rooms and breathe her air and touch her things and know her in a way she hasn't consented to.

There's no operational justification. No Brotherhood angle, no strategic value, no information I need that I can't get from surveillance. This is pure transgression. The desire to cross every boundary she has—not to destroy them, but to inhabit the space they protect. To be inside her life the way I want to be inside her body.

I wait until noon. She's between clients. She won't leave the office. The block is quiet, the midday lull when the neighborhood empties out.

I get out of the car. Walk to the blue door. The vestibule lock takes forty seconds—a Schlage, old, the pins worn smoothfrom years of use. The inner door is even easier. I'm inside in under a minute, standing at the bottom of a staircase that smells like old wood and radiator heat and something else, something faint, that I recognize from standing close to her on Tuesday night.

Her. The trace of her. I breathe it in and stand very still at the bottom of the stairs.

Then I go up.

Her apartment is on the third floor. One deadbolt—better than the street door, but still manageable. I work it slowly, carefully, leaving no marks on the plate. The door opens.