Page 37 of Dark Billionaire Predator

She wants more. She'll come for it. Not because I've manipulated her into it—the manipulation got me to the street, got me to the hallway, got me to the texts. But the kiss was real. The want was real. What happens next will be real, too.

And it will be hers.

I start the engine. Pull away from the curb. Drive south.

The taste of her stays all the way to Gowanus.

Chapter 13 - Lucy

He's gone and I'm still against the wall.

The stone is cold through my coat. My back is pressed against it the way he pressed me against it—the same position, the same contact, but empty now. The space where his body was is just air. November air, cold and indifferent, filling the gap he left when he stepped back and saidwhen you've decidedand walked away.

I can hear his footsteps. Receding. Unhurried, the way they were when they approached—the same deliberate rhythm, the same refusal to rush. A man who walks at his own pace, whether he's advancing or retreating, because for Benedict Ambrose, even leaving is a form of control.

The footsteps fade. I'm alone in the doorway of a brownstone on a residential street in the West Village, and my mouth is swollen and my hands are empty and my heart is running at a rate that would concern me professionally if I encountered it in a client.

I don't move. Not because I can't—because the wall is the only thing keeping me vertical. My legs are unreliable. My knees are doing something they haven't done since I was a teenager, a liquid trembling that has nothing to do with cold and everything to do with the fact that thirty seconds ago a man's mouth was on my throat and I made a sound I didn't know I could make and he heard it and heleft.

The city comes back in pieces. Sounds first—a car horn on Bleecker, the distant hum of traffic on Seventh Avenue, someone's television through an open window two floors up. Then light—the streetlamps, the glow of a phone screen in a passing car, the lit windows of the building across the streetwhere someone is living a normal life on a normal Friday night without a man's taste in their mouth.

My hand comes up. Touches my lips. The gesture is involuntary—I'm checking, confirming, verifying that the physical evidence matches the memory. My mouth is tender. The lower lip is slightly swollen where his teeth—or mine, I can't remember, it was both of us, it was everything at once—caught the skin.

I push off the wall. Walk the half block to my building. Blue door. Vestibule. Stairs. My keys are in my hand, but I don't remember taking them out of my bag. Muscle memory. The body operating on autopilot while the mind is somewhere else entirely—in a doorway, against a wall, with a man's hand in my hair and his mouth on my pulse.

Apartment. Door. Lock. Once. Twice.

I stand in the dark kitchen with my coat on and I press my palms flat on the counter and I try to breathe the way I teach clients to breathe—structured, counted, the four-seven-eight pattern that activates the parasympathetic system and signals safety to the brainstem.

In for four. My breath shakes on the inhale.

Hold for seven. I can still feel his thumb on my cheekbone. The way it traced the bone slowly, deliberately, before he kissed me. As if he was memorizing the architecture of my face with his hands.

Out for eight. The exhale is uneven, broken in the middle by something that isn't a sob but lives in the same neighborhood. A sound that has no clinical name. The sound of a woman whose container has shattered.

***

I take off my coat. Hang it on the hook. Go to the bathroom. Turn on the light.

The woman in the mirror is someone I've never seen. My hair is disordered—his hand was in it, his fingers wrapped in it, pulling my head back to expose my throat. My lips are dark, flushed with blood, visibly swollen. My eyes are wide and bright in a way that has nothing to do with the fluorescent bulb above the mirror.

I look aroused. That's the clinical term and it's accurate and I hate its accuracy because it strips away the complexity and leaves just the biology—dilated pupils, increased blood flow to the lips and skin, the visible markers of a body that has been touched in a way it wanted to be touched.

I open the medicine cabinet. The sertraline is on the second shelf, where it always is. I take it every night—the small daily ritual that keeps the anxiety at a manageable level, that maintains the container I use to hold other people's pain without drowning in it. The medication that keeps me level. Functional. Professional.

The container is shattered. I take the pill anyway. Swallow it with water from the tap. Close the cabinet. Look at myself in the mirror again.

What are you doing?

The question is clinical. Detached. The voice of Dr. Lucy Anderson, licensed psychologist, assessing a patient who is exhibiting signs of compromised judgment and impaired decision-making.

The patient doesn't answer. The patient is standing in a bathroom, touching her own mouth and thinking about a man's hands on her waist.

***

Bed. Dark. The sheets are cool and clean, and they smell like laundry detergent, not like him, and the absence of his scent is a relief and a loss simultaneously.

I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and the kiss replays.