Page 54 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"The wall."

"How long have you had it?"

"Since I moved into the church. Seven years. The investigation is older."

She's quiet for a long time. I drive along the waterfront. The lights of Manhattan are bright across the water, the skyline indifferent to what's happening in this car.

"Who did it?" she asks.

"I don't know yet. But it's connected to a family called St. Croix. My father discovered something about the patriarch—something personal, something he'd been hiding. Three weeks after the confrontation, my father was dead."

"And the patriarch?"

"Dead too. About five years later. Supposedly natural causes—but nothing is natural in these families."

She turns this over. I can feel her working it—not clinically, not as a diagnosis. As a woman trying to understand the shape of the thing she's inside. Because she's inside it now. She's in my car and my bed and my church and my investigation, and the walls between those things are dissolving.

"You live in a church," she says. "You have scars from knives. You just used the word Brotherhood like it means something specific. Your family has more locked doors than any family I've ever encountered."

I look at her. She's not asking a question. She's listing what she knows—building the picture, showing me the pieces she's collected. Telling me she sees more than I've shown her.

"What are you asking, Lucy?"

"I'm asking who you are. Not the name, not the donor, not the man who showed up at my crisis center with fifty thousand dollars and a strategy. Who are you?"

"I told you who I am."

"You told me your father was murdered. That's a mission. I'm asking about the man on the mission."

I pull over. A side street near the Sunset Park pier. Dark. Empty. The water lapping against the pilings, the distant hum of the expressway overhead.

I turn off the engine. The silence is sudden and total. We're sitting in a dark car on a dead street with the harbor in front of us, and she's asking me who I am, and the answer to that question is the one thing I've never given anyone.

I don't answer with words.

I reach across the console. My hand finds the back of her neck—the place I know, the place I've mapped, the curve of muscle and tendon that fits in my palm like it was designed for it. I pull her toward me and she comes. No resistance. No hesitation. The woman from the shift and the questions and the careful accumulation of information disappears, and what's left is the woman from the church. The one who said my name. The one who knows what my hands do in the dark.

I kiss her. Slower than the church, slower than the doorway. My hand on her neck, her mouth opening under mine, the taste of her that I've been carrying for three days. She makes a sound—small, soft, the exhale of a woman who has been holding herself together for four hours and is finally letting go.

"Come here," I say against her mouth.

She climbs over the console. Graceless, awkward—the confined geometry of a car, the tangle of limbs and steering wheel and gear shift. She ends up in my lap, her knees on either side of my hips, her hands on my shoulders, and the weight of her against me is the answer to every question I've refused to ask.

I push the seat back. She settles into my lap and I can feel her through the layers of clothing—the heat, the pressure, the way her hips shift against mine and my hands find her waist and hold her still.

"Don't move," I say.

She goes still. The compliance is immediate—her body responding to my voice the way it responded in the choir loft, the animal obedience that bypasses the mind and lives in the nervous system. Her breath is fast. Her hands are gripping my shoulders. She's looking down at me in the dark and her face is barely visible, but I can feel her eyes.

I run my hands up her thighs. Slowly. Through the fabric of her jeans, up to her hips, her waist. I take my time because the car is small and the confinement makes every gesture count. Her breath catches when my hands reach her ribs. She's trembling—not cold. Want. The fine, full-body tremor of a woman who has been thinking about being touched for three days and is being touched.

I unbutton her jeans. The sound of the zipper in the quiet car is obscene. She lifts her hips—the same cooperation from the church, the same willingness, the raised body that saysyeswithout words—and I work the fabric down, not all the way, just enough. Her underwear is thin. I push it aside with my thumb and she gasps and her head drops forward, her forehead against mine, her hair falling around us like a curtain.

I touch her. Directly. Two fingers sliding into the wet heat of her and her whole body clenches around my hand and the sound she makes is the sound from the choir loft—the one that lives underneath everything, the one that breaks me open every time I hear it.

"You've been thinking about this," I say. Low. My mouth against her ear. "All day. In your office. With your clients. You've been sitting in your chair with the bruise on your throat and thinking about my hands."

"Yes." The word is broken. Barely there. She's moving against my hand, small, urgent movements, her hips rocking, her forehead pressed against mine.