Page 50 of Dark Billionaire Predator

I stare at the screen. He knows I'm wearing a scarf. He knows. Which means he either assumed it—a reasonable assumption, given the bruise—or he's watching. Right now.Somewhere near this restaurant, on this street, he is watching me eat lunch with his brother's wife and he is texting me about the mark he left on my body.

Ava is talking. Something about the holidays, about flights. I'm not hearing her. I'm holding my phone under the table and reading five words that have turned my nervous system into a live wire.

Touch it for me.

A command. Not a request. The same voice—the text version of the voice—that saidsay my namein the choir loft. The voice that doesn't ask.

I put the phone down. Face down. Look at Ava. Smile. Nod at whatever she's saying.

My hand comes up and adjusts the scarf. The gesture is small—a woman straightening her neckwear, a habitual motion, nothing. But my fingers press against the bruise through the silk, and the contact sends a wave of sensation from my throat to my chest to the place between my legs that has been making itself known at inappropriate moments since Saturday night, and I have to press my lips together to keep the expression off my face.

I just followed his instruction. Sitting across from his brother's wife in a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, I just touched the bruise he left on my throat because he told me to.

The phone buzzes again.

Good girl.

The words hit me like a hand. The clinical part of my brain—the flickering pilot light—notes the language: dominance reinforcement, behavioral conditioning, the deliberate use of praise to reward compliance. Textbook. I could write the paper.

The rest of me—the part that isn't clinical, the part that said his name in the dark and let him flip me onto my stomach and pull my hair—the rest of me feels the words in my body. Feels the heat of them. The specificity. He's watching me obey him from somewhere outside this restaurant and the knowledge of his gaze—the invisible pressure of his attention on my skin—is doing something to me that I cannot allow to show on my face because Ava is sitting three feet away.

"Lucy? You okay?"

"Fine. Sorry. Work email."

Ava looks at me. The sister look—the one that saysI know that's not true, but I'm going to let you have it.She's always been generous with her silences, Ava. Always been willing to let me keep my walls intact, even when she can see them.

"You look flushed," she says.

"Hot in here."

She studies me for a moment longer. Then lets it go. Moves on. Tells me about a book she's reading, about a conversation with Josiah about kids—not yet, but maybe, I don't know, what do you think?—and I listen and nod and contribute the appropriate responses and the whole time my phone is face down on the table, holding two texts that are burning a hole through the screen.

At some point, Ava mentions the family again. Not the dinner—something else. Something offhand.

"It's funny," she says. "There are still rooms in that house I haven't been in. Whole wings. And when I ask, he just..." She makes a vague gesture. "Changes the subject. Lovingly, you know. But firmly."

"Does that bother you?"

"Sometimes. Mostly, I've made peace with it. Every family has their private spaces. The Ambroses just have more of them than most." She spears a piece of salad. "Gabriel especially. That man has more locked doors than a bank vault."

I file this. Gabriel. Locked doors. The family that operates in shadow. Another piece of the picture I'm assembling—not as a clinician now. As a woman who has been inside Benedict's private space and saw a wall of documents and a life built on secrets.

"Has Benedict ever talked to Josiah about their father?" I ask. The question is as casual as I can make it. A sister-in-law's idle curiosity.

Ava looks up. "Their father? Edward?"

"I just—I know he died when they were young. Josiah never really talks about it."

"Josiah doesn't talk about a lot of things." She says it without bitterness—just a fact. "But no, Benedict especially doesn't. I've been in a room with him maybe ten times and he's never mentioned their father. He's never mentioned much of anything, actually. He's..." She searches for the word. "Contained."

Contained. The word she chose for the man who fucked me against monastic sheets with his hand in my hair and his mouth on my throat. The word she chose for the man who just texted megood girlfrom somewhere outside this window.

"He seems intense," I say.

"That's one word for it." Ava laughs. "Josiah says he's the family mystery. Even Gabriel doesn't always know what Benedict's doing. He has his own place—won't live at the manor—and he comes and goes on his own schedule." She pauses. "Why the sudden interest?"

"No reason. Just thinking about family dynamics. Occupational hazard."