Page 62 of Dark Billionaire Predator

Josiah. Direct where Gabriel is oblique. My middle brother doesn't circle. He walks straight to the point and plants a flag in it.

I hear you.

Do you? Because hearing me and doing something about it are two different things with you. They always have been.

I don't respond. He's right—and the fact that he's right, that both my brothers have now told me to be present on Saturday, to set aside whatever's distracting me, to fall back in line—it presses against the inside of my ribs like a hand squeezing. The Brotherhood. The family. The obligations that existed before I had a wall or a woman or a reason to be distracted, and that will exist long after both have destroyed me or saved me.

I put the phone down. Look at the wall. Look at the window. Look at the bed where I'll sleep tonight alone in clean sheets that hold nothing of her, though my body insists otherwise.

Saturday. Two days. Lucy will be in the house where I grew up. She'll see the hallways, the library, the portrait. She'll sit at the table where my father sat, in the room where decisions were made that shaped the Brotherhood for decades, and she'll carry the knowledge of his murder underneath whateverdress she wears—carry it silently, carefully, the way she carries everything. The professional who holds other people's weight. Holding mine now. Not because I asked. Because she reached for it.

And across that same table will be Harlan Cates, who manages money for the St. Croix family, whose presence Gabriel has arranged with the deliberate casualness that my brother applies to things that matter most.

I go to the case. Take out the tanto. Carry it back to the nave.

Twenty feet. The target, scarred and waiting.

I throw until the light is gone and the church is dark and the target has become a sound rather than a sight—the thud of steel into wood, over and over, the rhythm of a man preparing himself for something he can feel coming but can't yet see.

Chapter 21 - Lucy

Thursday evening. Eight forty-five. I'm in bed with a book I'm not reading and a cup of tea I've let go cold on the nightstand, and the apartment is so quiet I can hear the upstairs neighbor's television through the ceiling—a low murmur of voices, canned laughter, the ambient soundtrack of someone else's evening.

My evening has no soundtrack. My evening is silence and a novel I've read the same paragraph of three times, and the particular quality of stillness that belongs to a woman lying alone in a bed that has only ever held one body. My body. My sheets, my pillows, my careful arrangement of comfort—the weighted blanket I bought after reading the research on proprioceptive input and anxiety, the lavender pillow spray I mix myself, the white noise machine I haven't turned on tonight because the silence feels deliberate. Like I'm waiting for something to fill it.

The phone buzzes on the nightstand. I reach for it with the Pavlovian speed I've developed over two weeks—the instant response, the grab, the screen-check that my body performs before my mind has authorized it. Benedict's name. But not a text.

He's calling.

I stare at the screen. He has never called me. Every communication between us has been text—commands, responses, the clipped economy of written words that allow both of us to compose and curate before we send. Texts are controlled. Texts are safe. Texts let you choose which version of yourself to transmit.

A phone call is something else.

I answer.

"Lucy."

His voice in my ear, in the dark, with no body attached to it—just sound, just breath, just the low register of a man speaking my name the way he always speaks it, like it's a word he's turning over in his mouth, tasting. But without the visual—without the sharp jaw and the gray eyes and the hands and the scars and the physical architecture of Benedict Ambrose arranged to perform whatever he wants me to see—his voice sounds different. Stripped down. The charming cadence is still there, the sardonic music of a man who learned early that wit was armor. But underneath it, something I haven't heard before. A rawness. Like the performance has thinned and what's underneath is closer to the surface than he usually allows.

"Benedict."

"Are you in bed?"

"Yes."

"What are you wearing?"

I almost laugh. "Is that where this is going?"

"I'm asking because I want to picture it. I've been in your apartment, but never like this—never with you knowing, never with you letting me. I've seen the layout. The books on the shelf, the photo of you and Ava. But I've never seen you in that bed. I want to see it now."

The admission catches me somewhere beneath my sternum. Not because it's revealing—I already know he surveilled me, already know he was inside these walls before I knew his name. But the distinction he's making.Never with you knowing. Never with you letting me.He's asking for somethinghe could have taken. Has taken, before. And the asking changes it.

"Old t-shirt," I say. "Gray. It has a Columbia logo that's almost completely faded. Shorts. My hair is up."

"What side of the bed?"

"Left."