Page 2 of Dark Billionaire Predator

She turns, as if she can feel me watching, and our eyes meet across the reception.

Time does something strange. Stretches. Contracts. I'm aware of everything and nothing—the music, the laughter, the clink of glasses, all of it fading to static while her gaze holds mine. She's curious. I can see it—the slight tilt of her head,the way her eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, the professional assessment she probably doesn't even realize she's making.

She's reading me.

I feel a spike of something—not quite fear, not quite excitement. Something in between. A thrill, sharp and electric, at the idea of being seen by someone who might actually be capable of it.

Then someone touches her arm, draws her into a conversation, and the moment breaks. She looks away. The world rushes back in—music, laughter, the sweet smell of roses and champagne.

I look away first. Force myself to turn, to pick up a conversation with one of Gabriel's council associates, to perform the role. But my hand is shaking. I press it flat against my thigh, where no one can see.

I don't approach her. Don't introduce myself, don't engineer a conversation, don't do any of the things I would normally do with a woman who's caught my attention. Because this isn't attention. This is something deeper, something more dangerous, and I know—with the bone-deep certainty of a man who has lived his entire life among predators—that if I get close to her now, I won't be able to walk away.

So I watch.

I watch her hug her sister on the dance floor, both of them teary-eyed, holding each other the way sisters do—like the world is uncertain but this, at least, is solid. I watch her pick up Iris when the baby starts fussing, bouncing her with an ease that suggests practice, and something twists in my chest at the sight of her cradling my niece against her shoulder.

I watch her slip off her shoes under the table and tuck her feet beneath her, getting comfortable, settling in. I watch her decline a fourth glass of champagne and switch to water. I watch her check her phone once, twice, then put it away with a small sigh that I shouldn't be able to hear from this distance, but somehow can.

I catalog everything. The way she pushes her hair behind her left ear when she's listening intently. The way she sits with one ankle crossed over the other, a habit so consistent it must be unconscious. The way her expression shifts when she thinks no one is looking—the warmth dimming, replaced by something more complicated. Tiredness, maybe. Or loneliness. The particular exhaustion of a person who spends all day holding space for other people's pain and has no one to hold space for hers.

I know that look. I wear it myself, underneath the mask.

The reception winds down. Guests filter out, trailing champagne and good wishes. I should be leaving too—I told Josiah I had business to attend to, old business, things that can't wait. And that's true. Three days ago, Bryan Vanderwal pulled me aside after a council meeting and said something that's been burning a hole in my mind ever since. A name. A connection. The first real thread I've had in eleven years of suspicion about my father's death.

But the old business can wait. It's been waiting eleven years. It can wait a little longer.

Lucy is at the coat check, wrapping a cashmere scarf around her neck. She's tired—I can see it in the slight droop of her shoulders, the careful way she moves, like she's rationing energy. She pulls out her phone, checks something, frowns. Taps on the screen. Probably calling a car.

I should let her go. Should walk away, get in my own car, drive back to the church. That's what I call it—the church. Not home, because I've never been able to call any place that. A deconsecrated Catholic church in Gowanus that I bought six years ago because something about its ruin spoke to me. Stone walls, vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows that throw colored light across the nave like a fever dream. I stripped out the pews, built a bedroom in the choir loft, and left the rest cavernous and echoing. A cathedral of emptiness. A monument to the kind of faith I've never had. Outside, the canal sits dark and still, carrying its poison to the sea. I've always found that comforting. At least the water is honest about what it holds.

I should go back there. Sit in the dark beneath the rose window and think about Vanderwal's name, the thread, the investigation that might finally give me answers.

Instead, I memorize her.

The way she looks standing in the doorway of my family's home, framed by the light behind her. The lavender dress, now slightly wrinkled from hours of sitting and dancing and living. The dark hair, mussed from the wind that's picked up outside. The way she wraps her arms around herself against the chill, a self-protective gesture that makes something in my chest ache.

She deserves better than me. Better than what I am, what I've done, what I'm capable of. She deserves a man whose hands are clean, whose past is simple, whose love doesn't come tangled up in blood and secrets and the kind of darkness that swallows everything it touches.

She deserves someone safe.

I am not safe. I have never been safe. I am the most dangerous thing that has ever set its sights on her, and she doesn't know it yet.

She will.

The car arrives. She gets in. The door closes. The taillights disappear down the long driveway, and I stand at the window watching until there's nothing left to see.

Behind me, the manor settles into silence. Staff clearing tables, extinguishing candles, dismantling the set pieces of my brother's happily ever after. Josiah and Ava have already gone upstairs. Gabriel and Poppy retreated an hour ago, Iris asleep against Gabriel's shoulder. The house belongs to the ghosts now—and to me, the brother who's always been most comfortable among them.

I sit in the darkened library, surrounded by books I've read and secrets I haven't told. My father's portrait hangs above the mantle—Edward Ambrose, painted in oils, looking down at me with an expression that might be pride or might be disappointment. Hard to tell with a dead man. Hard to tell with him, even when he was alive.

Someone killed you. I've believed it for eleven years, and now Vanderwal has given me a reason to think I might finally prove it.

But not tonight. Tonight belongs to something else.

I pull out my phone. Open a browser. Type her name into the search bar with fingers that are steadier now, purposeful.

Lucy Anderson. Licensed clinical psychologist. Private practice in Greenwich Village, specializing in trauma and attachment disorders. Columbia University, graduated summa cum laude. Published three papers on complex PTSD in theJournal of Traumatic Stress.Volunteers at a crisis center on Tuesday evenings. Lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment on West 10th Street.