Page 8 of Dark Billionaire Predator

Two weeks of surveillance has given me everything I need—her schedule, her habits, her routines. I know the external architecture of Lucy Anderson's life. Now I want the interior. I want to hear her voice directed at me, not overheard from across a street. Want to sit across from her and let her read me, the way she reads everyone, and see what she finds.

The idea terrifies me. Good. Fear means it matters.

What would she see? The charming youngest brother, the one with the sharp tongue and the easy smile? That's what most people see—it's what I built it for. Or would she look deeper, the way she does with her clients, past the performance to the thing underneath? The restlessness. The violence. The desperate need for the silence that only comes when someone stops breathing.

She's a therapist. She sits with people's darkness every day. But there's a difference between holding space for someone else's damage and discovering it in the man trying to hold your hand.

I pull out my phone. Open the text thread with Josiah—dormant since the night of the wedding.

How's married life treating you?

The reply comes fast.Good. Really good. Why?

Can't a brother check in?

You never check in. What do you want?

I smile despite myself.

Ava's sister. Lucy. I'm thinking of reaching out. Would it be weird?

A long pause. Then:Why?

She seemed interesting at the wedding. Thought I'd say hello.

Another pause, longer. I can practically hear him running the angles.

Be careful with her, Benedict. She's important to Ava. If you hurt her—

I'm not going to hurt her.

That's what I said about Ava. Look how that turned out.

It turned out with a wedding. You're welcome.

Just be careful. She's been through a lot. She doesn't need an Ambrose brother making her life more complicated.

I stare at the message. He's right, of course. She doesn't need me. Doesn't need my complications, my darkness, my inability to walk past an alley without leaving a body in it. She's a woman who heals people for a living, and I'm a man who breaks them. The math isn't complicated.

But need and want are different things. And I've never been good at denying myself what I want.

I'll be gentle,I type.Promise.

I set the phone down. Look up at the mosaic—those chipped, faded eyes still watching.

"Don't judge me," I say to the empty church. "You're in no position."

I climb the stairs to the choir loft, strip off my clothes, and lie in the bed I built where a choir once sang hymns to a God I've never believed in. The sheets are cold. The ceiling is high and dark and distant. Through the stained glass above me, the streetlight outside throws a fractured halo of color across the stone—blue and gold and a deep, arterial red that shifts when the wind moves the branches of the trees along the canal.

I think about Lucy Anderson and the single moment of eye contact that rewired something in my brain. About the warmth she carries, the openness, the fundamental orientation toward connection that's so foreign to everything I know.

I think about the silence that follows a kill and how wrong it is that violence is the only thing that quiets me.

I think about a piece of paper with a name and a date, and eleven years of suspicion that might finally lead somewhere.

Tomorrow, I'm going to meet her. Not by accident. Not through Josiah or Ava or the convenient fiction of a family connection. I'm going to walk into her life the same way I walk into everything—eyes open, knife hidden, burning with a want I can't control.

She deserves better.