Page 39 of Dark Billionaire Predator

I haven't decided. But my phone is face-up on the nightstand, and my mouth is swollen, and I checked the lock twice and not three times, and somewhere between the kiss and the dark and the sound I made when his mouth found my throat, the woman who hadn't decided became a woman who was just waiting for the courage to admit what she'd already chosen.

The lock is checked. The apartment is dark. The pill is taken.

And I lie in the dark and I don't sleep and I feel him everywhere—my mouth, my jaw, my throat, my hair, the back of my neck where his fingers gripped, my waist where his hands pressed, every point of contact burning like a constellation mapped on my skin by a man who has been studying me for weeks and tonight, for the first time, touched what he'd been watching.

I close my eyes.

Sleep doesn't come.

Chapter 14 - Benedict

Saturday. The church. I'm staring at the wall and seeing nothing.

The documents are there—Dominic's financials, the shell companies, the monthly payments that increased three times over twenty-nine years. I found the increases this morning, cross-referenced the dates, pinned them to the timeline. The investigation is advancing. The shape behind the frosted glass is sharpening.

I don't care. I can't make myself care. The wall of a dead man's secrets is six feet in front of me, and all I can see is Lucy Anderson's face in the dark when I stepped back from the kiss. Eyes closed. Mouth swollen. Hands opening and closing on nothing.

The taste of her is still in my mouth. Twelve hours later, after coffee and whiskey and the cold November air of the canal, I can still taste her. Wine and cold skin and something underneath that was purely her—a taste I have no reference for, no comparison, nothing in my experience that maps to the specific chemistry of Lucy Anderson's mouth.

I sit at the desk in the transept, and I try to work. The Philadelphia contract needs attention—Gabriel's assignment, the thing I should be doing instead of sitting in a ruined church obsessing over a woman's mouth. I open the file. Read two paragraphs. Close the file.

Her fists in my coat. The way they gripped—not holding on but holdingme,pulling me closer with a force that contradicted every clinical framework she's spent three weeks building between us. The anger in her kiss. The teeth on my lip. The sound she made when my mouth found her throat.

I told her to come to me. I saidwhen you've decided, you know how to reach me.And now I'm living inside that sentence, waiting, and the waiting is a form of torture I designed for myself and deserve.

The predator has surrendered the initiative. Every instinct says go back. Find her. Finish what I started in that doorway. I could be on her block in twenty minutes. I could be at the blue door in twenty-five. I could—

I don't. I sit in the church and I wait and the waiting is killing me.

***

Four-seventeen PM. My phone buzzes.

I look at the screen. Lucy's number. One word.

Benedict.

I stop breathing. The phone in my hand. The eight letters on the screen. My name, typed by her thumbs, sent from her phone, delivered to mine. The thing she wouldn't say at the crisis center. The wall she maintained through the tour and the texts and the dark street and the kiss. The last defense.

She's given it up. Twelve hours after I walked away from her in a doorway, she's typed my name and pressed send and the distance between us has collapsed to the width of a text message.

I should reply immediately. The predator should reply immediately—should capitalize, should press the advantage, should do what I've done at every stage of this pursuit and close the distance before she can rebuild her defenses.

I don't reply immediately. I sit in the nave holding the phone and I feel something I don't recognize. Not triumph. Notthe satisfaction of a plan executed. Something that lives closer to fear—the particular terror of a man who has been chasing something for weeks and has just caught it and realizes, in the instant of catching, that the thing he's caught might be bigger than he is.

I type an address. The church. Send.

No words. No invitation. Nocome to me.Just the location—the GPS coordinates of my life, the place I've never brought anyone, the ruin where I sleep and plan and pin dead men's secrets to the wall. The innermost circle.

She gave me the name. I'm giving her my address. The exchange is equal. The vulnerability is equal. For the first time in this, we're on level ground.

The reply comes in four minutes.

I'll be there in forty.

***

I spend the forty minutes doing something I've never done. I prepare a space for someone else.