Page 69 of Dark Billionaire Predator

My hand slides higher. The inside of her thigh, where the skin is softer, warmer. The dress parts easily—the wrap design, the fabric that opens at the slightest pressure. My fingers spread against her skin and I feel her pulse there too, the rapid beat of blood just beneath the surface.

Above the table, I'm nodding at something Cates is saying about municipal bond strategies. Below the table, I find the spot. The inside of her thigh, three inches above her knee. Soft, hidden, a place the dress will cover entirely.

I press my fingers into her skin—not a caress. A grip. Firm, sustained, the kind of pressure that doesn't register as pain immediately but builds. The skin whitens under my fingers. The blood retreats and pools and the bruise begins to form in real time, at a dinner table, while eight people eat lamb and discuss legacy portfolios.

Lucy's hand finds her wine glass. She lifts it. Drinks. Sets it down with perfect steadiness. Her face is flawless—composed, attentive, interested in whatever Poppy is saying about Iris learning to walk. Not a flicker. Not a tremor.

But under the table, her thigh presses into my hand. Harder. Seeking the pressure rather than retreating from it.

I hold the grip for thirty seconds. Forty. A minute. Long enough for the blood vessels to respond, for the tissue to register the intrusion, for the mark to set. The bruise won't bloom fully until later—an hour, maybe two—but the foundation is there. My fingerprints on her skin. Four points of pressure that will darken to purple by morning.

I release her. Slowly. My fingers trace the place where the bruise is forming—a light touch now, almost tender, the gentleness that follows the violence. The contrast is the point. The shift from grip to caress, from pain to comfort, from taking to giving. She knows this about me. She's learning the rhythm of it—the way I alternate between rough and soft, between command and reverence, between the man who hurts and the man who soothes what he's hurt.

Her leg trembles under my fingers. One small tremor, quickly controlled.

Above the table, Cates is telling a story about a client's vineyard in Bordeaux. Gabriel is pretending to be interested. I pull my hand back to my own side of the table and pick up my fork and eat a bite of lamb and the world above the tablecloth continues as if nothing has changed.

Everything has changed. Lucy has my mark forming under her dress and my fingerprints cooling on her skin and she is smiling at Poppy and asking about baby food and the performance is so perfect, so controlled, so beautifullydisciplined that I want to take her apart right here at this table, in front of all of them, and show them what she looks like when the composure finally breaks.

I don't. I eat my dinner. I charm Harlan Cates. I perform.

But my hand remembers.

The dinner continues for another hour. Bryan tells stories about the old days—carefully curated, designed to seem like the reminiscences of an old man but actually laced with information that only those who know how to listen would catch. I listen. I catch a reference to Dominic's early years on the council—a dispute over territory, a vote that split the founding families. Bryan mentions it as an anecdote. I hear it as evidence.

Gabriel watches Bryan with an expression I can't read. He watches me watching Bryan with an expression I can read even less.

Cates gives me a business card before he leaves. "If you're ever interested in discussing opportunities," he says. The card is heavy stock, embossed. I slip it into my pocket and know that the opportunities Cates wants to discuss have nothing to do with investment portfolios and everything to do with whatever game is being played between the Ambrose and St. Croix families.

Lucy helps Poppy clear dessert plates. I watch her move through the dining room—the navy dress, the easy grace, the way she touches Poppy's arm when she takes a plate from her hands. The same unconscious warmth she extends to everyone. But when she passes behind my chair, her fingers brush the back of my neck. Light. Brief. Gone before anyone could see it.

The touch travels through me like electricity through water.

The evening ends gradually. Cates leaves first, then Bryan in his wheelchair. Josiah and Ava linger—Ava holding a sleeping Iris, Josiah watching his wife hold his niece with an expression that on any other man would be called tender.

Lucy gets her coat. Ava is saying goodbye to Poppy in the hallway. Gabriel has retreated to the library. Josiah is helping the nurse load Bryan's wheelchair into the van.

For thirty seconds, maybe less, Lucy and I are alone in the foyer.

She looks at me. The composure is still in place—flawless, unbreakable. But her eyes are dark. Dilated. And her left hand is resting against her thigh, against the place under the dress where my fingerprints are settling into her skin.

"Can you feel it?" I ask. Quietly. For her only.

"Yes."

"How does it feel?"

"Like you're still there."

Ava's voice from the hallway—"Lucy, you ready?"—and the moment breaks. Lucy adjusts her coat. Smiles at me. The polite, pleasant smile of a woman who barely knows her sister's brother-in-law.

She walks out. The door closes. The taillights disappear down the drive the same way they did at the wedding, three months ago, when I stood at this window and watched her leave and decided that everything could wait.

Everything is still waiting. The wall, the investigation, Ruth Calloway in New Haven, whatever Harlan Cates is really doing at my brother's dinner table. All of it waiting while I stand in the foyer of my father's house with the ghost of Lucy Anderson's skin on my fingers and Cates's card in my pocket andthe painted eyes of Edward Ambrose looking down at me from the landing.

I walk to the library. Gabriel is at the desk, the lamp low, a glass of scotch untouched beside him.

"Cates," I say.