Page 57 of Dark Billionaire Predator

A pause. Then:Did you sleep?

No. Did you?

No.

I wait. The typing indicator appears, disappears, appears again. Benedict—who texts with the precision of a man who always knows exactly what he wants to say—is hesitating.

I keep hearing you say it. In the car. What you said.

Not alone anymore. He doesn't type the words, but I can feel them in the negative space, in what he's circling. I don't make him say it. I don't type it either. Some things live better in the air between two people than on a screen.

I meant it,I type.

I know. That's the problem.

I put the phone down. Pick up my bag. Walk to work.

***

My nine o'clock is a new client—a college student, twenty, referred by her university counselor for anxiety and sleep disturbance. She sits on my couch with her knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her shins, making herself as small as possible. She tells me she can't sleep because she keeps thinking about a boy. Not a boyfriend—a boy she met at a party who looked at her across the room and something happened. Something she can't name. She thinks about him constantly. Dreams about him. Can't focus in class. She's afraid something is wrong with her.

"There's nothing wrong with you," I say, and the words come from a place so deep I feel them vibrate in my sternum. "Obsessive thoughts about someone can be a normal responseto intense attraction. The question is whether the thoughts are interfering with your ability to function."

"They are," she says. "I can't do anything without thinking about him."

"Then we should explore what the obsession is doing for you. What need it's meeting. Sometimes we fixate on another person because they represent something we're missing in ourselves."

I hear myself. I hear the clinical framework, the measured language, the careful therapeutic distance. And underneath it, like a second heartbeat, I hear the voice that says:You hypocrite. You absolute hypocrite. You can't do anything without thinking about him either. You went to work on Monday with his teeth marks under your scarf. You followed his instructions at lunch while your sister sat across from you. You had sex with him in a parked car twelve hours ago and you're sitting here telling a twenty-year-old that obsessive thoughts are worth examining.

The difference, the clinical voice insists, is that I'm aware of it. I can name the dynamic. I understand the neurochemistry—the dopamine flooding, the intermittent reinforcement, the way his unpredictability triggers the same reward pathways as addiction. I understand the attachment pattern—anxious-avoidant, textbook, his withdrawal creating my pursuit, my warmth creating his approach, the push-pull that generates intensity.

I understand all of it. Understanding changes nothing.

The session ends. The student leaves. I sit in the silence of my office and press my fingers against the bruise under my scarf and feel it pulse, and the pulse travels down my body like a current, and I think about his hand on my throat in the car, andthe understanding I have—the clinical, professional, hard-won understanding—dissolves like sugar in hot water.

***

At lunch I call Ava.

Not to investigate. I need to hear my sister's voice—the steady, sharp, certain sound of Ava Anderson, assistant U.S. attorney, woman who walked into the Ambrose world and came out the other side married and somehow intact. I need to hear someone who has navigated this and survived.

"Hey," she says. "Two calls in one week. You okay?"

"Fine. Just checking in."

"Liar. You never just check in. What's going on?"

I almost tell her. The words are right there—I'm sleeping with your husband's brother, he told me his father was murdered, I said not alone anymore while he was still inside me, and I don't know what I'm doing.The words are shaped and ready and I swallow them whole because I can't. Not yet. Not until I understand what I'm telling her. Not until I know what I'm inside of.

"The dinner," I say instead. "At the manor. You said Gabriel is hosting."

"Saturday. The whole family. Poppy's cooking, which means it'll be incredible. Gabriel's been—I don't know. He's been wanting to bring everyone together. Josiah says it's because Iris is starting to walk and Gabriel wants an audience." She laughs. "But you know Gabriel. There's always another reason underneath the one he gives you."

"Who's everyone?"

"Us. Gabriel and Poppy. Iris. Benedict, presumably, though he's hard to pin down. Maybe a few others—Gabriel mentioned some business associates. Why?"

"I'll come."