Page 35 of Dark Billionaire Predator

She's angry. I can see it—the same structural anger from the crisis center, but less contained now, looser, the edges fraying. Because the crisis center had rules and context and professional obligation, and this has none of those things. This is just a dark street and two people and the raw fact of what's been building between them for three weeks.

"You told me you hadn't decided," I say.

"I told you that at midnight. It's been twenty hours."

"And?"

"And I haven't had twenty hours. I've had a full day of clients and a session where I lost focus for the second time in my career because I was thinking about—"

She stops. The word she didn't say hangs in the air between us.

"About what?" I say. I take a step closer. Five feet now.

"You know what."

"Say it."

"No."

"Say it, Lucy."

Her name in my mouth in the dark. The first time I've said it to her face. At the crisis center, it wasDr. Anderson.In the texts, it was typed, disembodied, a word on a screen. But here, spoken aloud, in the dark, with five feet between us and the streetlight not reaching—her name sounds like the thing it is. A key turning.

"I was thinking about your texts," she says. Quiet. Controlled. But the control is costing her. I can hear it in the slight unevenness of her breath, the places where the steadiness has to be manufactured. "About what you said. About my name. About the way, I wouldn't say yours."

"And?"

"And I've been standing in that doorway you're so fond of talking about, and I don't know which direction to step, and you showing up here is not helping me decide."

"I'm not here to help you decide."

"Then why are you here?"

Three feet. I closed the distance without consciously choosing to. The way I always do—the tide, the gravity, the thingin me that moves toward her without consulting the part of my brain that should be running this operation.

"Because I couldn't not be," I say.

It's the truest thing I've said to her. The truest thing I've said to anyone. It arrives without strategy, without calculation, without the mask I've worn in every interaction since I was old enough to understand that masks are survival. Just the raw, stupid, devastating fact of it—I am here because the alternative was unbearable, because twenty hours without seeing her face was a physical condition I couldn't treat, because the choir loft smelled like stone and not like her, and the difference was killing me.

She hears the truth. I watch it land—not in her face, which stays controlled, but in her body. Her shoulders drop a fraction. Her hands, which were clenched at her sides, open. The stance of a woman whose defenses have encountered something they weren't built for.

"You need to leave," she says.

"Tell me to leave."

"I just did."

"No. You said I need to. That's not the same thing."

The silence between us is so thick I can hear her breathing. In and out. The slightly elevated rhythm that tells me her heart rate is climbing the way mine is. We're standing in the dark and our bodies are having a conversation that our mouths haven't caught up to yet.

"Tell me to leave, Lucy. Mean it. And I'll go."

She opens her mouth. Closes it.

The not-speaking is louder than anything she's said. The held breath. The visible effort of a woman trying to form the wordgoand finding that her body won't produce it.

I step forward. Two feet. Close enough to see the pulse in her throat. Close enough to smell her—that clean, warm scent I know from her apartment, from her towel, from the ghost traces I've been carrying on my clothes for a week. But this is different. This is her, right now, in the cold, her skin flushed and her breath visible and her eyes locked on mine with an expression I haven't seen before. Not fear. Not anger. Not the clinical assessment or the professional composure.