Page 60 of Dark Billionaire Predator

But the law firm payment sits apart. One hundred and forty thousand dollars, twenty years ago, routed through a different shell entity—not Hargrove, not part of the monthly architecture at all. A separate channel for a separate purpose. And the amount is wrong for the pattern. The monthly payments are modest—four figures, the kind of sum designed not to draw attention. This is six figures, one-time, paid to lawyers. Something specific happened twenty years ago that required Dominic St. Croix to spend serious money through a channel he'd kept separate from his regular financial machinery.

I spent two hours tonight trying to find anything useful about Whitfield & Parrish online. The firm barely exists digitally—a placeholder website with a New Haven address, a phone number, three partner names, and nothing else. No practice areas listed. No client testimonials. No press mentions, no case results, no thought-leadership blog. The kind of firm that doesn't need to advertise because its clients already know how to find it. Old money serves old money. Word of mouth, referrals, generations of trust built behind closed doors.

The three partners: Harold Whitfield, deceased 2021. James Parrish, retired. And a third—Ruth Calloway, still listed,presumably still active. If the firm still exists, Ruth Calloway is my way in. But not by phone. A firm this private doesn't answer questions from strangers. I'll need to go there. Sit in a waiting room. Find a reason to be asking about a twenty-year-old payment without revealing why or who I am.

Monday. After the dinner. I'll drive to New Haven and find Ruth Calloway and see what a hundred and forty thousand dollars bought Dominic St. Croix.

I step back from the wall. The stained glass is dark at this hour—no light behind it, the colors dormant, the saints and prophets invisible until morning returns them to their fractured glory. The cold has settled into the stone the way it always does, a damp chill that the space heater in the corner barely dents. I should have insulated when I converted the building. Should have done a lot of things. Instead, I left the stone bare and the windows intact and the choir loft open to the nave below, and I live in a space that was built for worship and repurposed for obsession, which is perhaps not as different as it sounds.

My phone is on the table beside the bed. I pick it up. No new messages from Lucy since the exchange that ended withI'll be there.Three words, sent from her dark apartment, and I've read them four times since she sent them.

She's coming to dinner Saturday. At the manor. Where my father's portrait hangs above the library mantle and Gabriel sits behind Edward's desk, and the hallways still carry the particular quality of silence that belongs to a house where power has been exercised for generations. She'll be in that house. With my brothers. With their wives. With me.

I put the phone down before I text her again. The impulse is there—constant now, a low hum beneath everything else, the need to reach through the distance between Gowanus and West10th Street and touch her. Not physically. Verbally. To send her something that makes her breath catch while she's lying in her bed. To know she's thinking about me in the dark, the way I'm thinking about her.

I told her about my father. In the car, with the harbor dark outside and her body in my lap and the windows fogged with the heat of what we'd just done. I told her the thing I've told no one in twelve years, and I told it in the same breath as I buried myself inside her, and I don't know which act was more intimate.

She didn't flinch. Didn't reach for the clinical distance that I've watched her use like armor with everyone else—the therapeutic voice, the careful framing, the professional compassion that keeps other people's pain at arm's length. She just sat in my car with my body still inside hers and listened, and when I was done, she touched my face and saidnot alone anymorewith a steadiness that wasn't performance. That was personal.

I don't know what to do with that. I have a wall of documents and twelve years of solitude and a methodology built on the assumption that this work is mine alone, that no one else can carry it, that isolation is the price of the hunt. She walked into that assumption and cracked it open with four words and the touch of her fingers on my jaw, and now I'm standing in my church at midnight trying to figure out what the architecture looks like with someone else inside it.

Not the investigation. She's not part of that. But the space around the investigation—the cold bed, the empty church, the hours between two and five in the morning when the silence becomes a sound and the sound becomes unbearable—she's in that space now. Whether I want her there or not.

I lie down. The sheets are clean. The bed holds nothing of her—the car, not the church, was last night. But my body remembers anyway. Skin has its own archive, separate from fabric, and mine has cataloged her so thoroughly that lying in the dark alone now feels like a specific kind of absence rather than the general emptiness I've lived with for years.

Sleep comes eventually. Late. Thin. Unrestful.

***

Thursday morning, I wake to weak light through the stained glass—the east-facing window, Christ carrying the cross, the reds and blues diluted by February overcast into something pale and cold. I lie still for a moment, orienting. The church does this to mornings—turns them liturgical, makes every dawn feel like a vigil ending. I bought this building because it was cheap and private, and no one in the Brotherhood would think to look for me in a house of God. I stayed because something about the space answered a need I couldn't name. The height of the ceiling. The silence that isn't empty but full—full of prayers spoken by strangers over a hundred years, soaked into the stone, lingering.

I get up. Cold floor under bare feet. The choir loft is open to the nave—no walls, just the railing and the drop and the vast space below where pews used to be. I cleared them out when I moved in, left the floor bare except for a workbench against the far wall and a heavy bag hanging from a beam I reinforced myself.

But this morning isn't for the bag. This morning is for the knives.

I keep them in a case beneath the bed—leather, fitted for twelve blades of varying lengths and weights. The case is older than most of the knives in it. I've been collecting andtraining since I was sixteen, when the Brotherhood decided I was old enough to learn what my hands could do beyond hitting. Gabriel was groomed for leadership. Josiah was shaped into a weapon with scope and precision—the long-range killer, the clean professional. I was the youngest, the one nobody quite knew what to do with, and so they taught me everything and let me find my own style. I found it in short steel. Close work. The kind of violence that requires you to be near enough to feel the other person's breath.

I carry the case down the narrow stairs to the nave. The space is enormous from down here—forty feet to the vaulted ceiling, the stained glass running along both walls in a procession of saints and sinners, the stone floor cold and smooth as water. I set up the target board against the far wall—scarred wood, the grain dark with years of steel—and open the case.

Twelve blades. I select three. The first is a six-inch drop-point I balanced myself by grinding the spine. The second is smaller—three inches, fast and light, designed for speed rather than penetration. The third is a custom tanto, the steel folded, the handle wrapped in black cord that has been worn smooth by my palm over the years. The best blade I own. The one that forgives nothing.

I stand at the mark. Twenty feet from the target. Bare feet, bare chest, the cold air raising the hair on my arms and tightening the scars that cross my torso—the thin white line below my left ribs from a Brotherhood operation in Marseille, the longer mark across my shoulder from a man in Lisbon who was faster than I expected and slower than he needed to be, the marks on my forearms from training, where the price of a slow block was a shallow cut and the lesson was written in skin.

The first throw is the drop-point. I don't think about it—thinking ruins the throw, introduces hesitation betweenintention and release, and hesitation is death. My arm moves. The blade leaves my hand. The rotation is clean—one full turn across twenty feet, the weight shifting from handle to point at the precise distance I've calibrated through years of repetition. The blade hits the target two inches left of center. A good throw. Not a great one.

I breathe. Reset. The second blade—the small spear-point—requires a different release, a wrist flick rather than a full arm extension. The rotation is faster, the window tighter. I adjust my stance. Throw. The blade buries itself an inch from the first, slightly higher. Better.

The tanto. The heaviest of the three, the most deliberate. This isn't a knife you throw casually. The weight demands commitment—a full body movement, shoulder and hip and wrist aligned, everything channeled into a single point of intention. I've thrown this blade thousands of times, and it still requires everything I have.

I throw. The tanto crosses the nave in silence—or what feels like silence, the whisper of steel through cold air too soft to register as sound. It hits the center of the target with a thud that resonates through the stone floor and into the soles of my bare feet.

Center. Perfect.

I stand in the aftermath of the throw, arm still extended, and feel the thing that knife work always gives me—the brief, clean emptiness that follows total concentration. No wall. No investigation. No dead father, no living woman, no dinner on Saturday, where every thread in my life will be sitting at the same table. Just the stone and the steel and the silence and the target with three blades in it, proof that my body still knows how to do one thing perfectly.

I retrieve the knives. Wipe the blades. Throw again. And again. For an hour, the church is nothing but the sound of steel hitting wood and my own breathing and the cold gray light through the saints in the windows, and I am nothing but a body in motion, precise and purposeful, and the noise in my head goes quiet the way it only goes quiet when I am doing the thing I was trained to do.

***