Page 9 of Dark Billionaire Predator

She's going to get me instead.

Chapter 3 - Lucy

The teenager won't stop crying.

She's sixteen, maybe seventeen—she won't give her name, won't say where she came from, won't do anything except sit in the plastic chair in the intake room and shake. I've been with her for forty minutes. My shift at the crisis center ended twenty minutes ago, but you don't leave a shaking teenager because your schedule says you can.

"You don't have to talk," I say. "You don't have to do anything. I'm just going to sit here with you. Okay?"

She nods. Keeps crying. I keep sitting.

This is what I do on Tuesday nights—the work I don't get paid for, the work I can't not do. Four hours of walk-ins at the Bleecker Street clinic, whoever comes through the door. Tonight, it was a man who sat in silence for the full session and then said "thank you" on his way out, a woman convinced her husband was poisoning her, and now this girl, this child, crying in a plastic chair under fluorescent light while I sit across from her and hold the space and try to be enough.

She leaves at ten-fifteen. Her mother comes—a woman with the particular exhaustion of someone who's been managing a crisis alone for too long. She doesn't meet my eyes. She takes her daughter by the arm and guides her out, and I watch them go and feel the familiar hollowing that comes after this kind of work. The sense of having poured something out that won't refill easily.

I lock up. Step outside. The November air hits me like a slap.

Bleecker Street is quiet at this hour on a Tuesday. Not the dangerous quiet of a bad neighborhood—the Village doesn't do dangerous, not really, not anymore—but the hollow quiet of a city block that's finished with its day. Restaurants closed or closing. A few people walking with the purposeful hunch of commuters heading home late. The particular amber loneliness of streetlights reflecting off wet pavement.

I walk fast. Keys in my hand, threaded between my fingers the way my mother taught me, the way every woman in New York learns before she's old enough to understand why. It's twelve blocks to my apartment. I've done this walk a hundred times. It's safe. I'm safe.

My body doesn't agree. My body is running its own calculations—the ones built into women at a biological level, the constant ambient math of *how far to the next lit doorway* and *who's behind me* and *could I scream loud enough.* I hate that I do this. I hate that every woman does this. I hate that it's rational.

I turn onto West 10th. My block. Almost home. The brownstones are dark on both sides, the trees stripped bare, their branches casting skeletal shadows under the streetlights. I can see my building from here—fourth from the corner, the one with the blue door. Sixty seconds and I'll be inside, and this day will be over, and I can stop being a vessel for everyone else's pain.

And then I see him.

A man, walking toward me from the other end of the block. Dark coat, hands in pockets, moving with a loose, unhurried gait that suggests he's in no rush to be anywhere. He's on my side of the street. Between me and my door.

My hand tightens around the keys. The adrenaline is instant—not panic, not yet, just the sharp chemical alertness of a body preparing for something it hasn't identified. I keep walking. He keeps walking. The distance between us shrinks.

He passes under a streetlight, and I see his face.

I know him.

It takes my brain a full second to place him—the signal traveling from recognition to memory to context like a message through bad wiring. The wedding. Josiah's brother. The toast, the sharp smile, the moment of eye contact across the reception that I've been failing to stop thinking about for three weeks.

Benedict.

He sees me at the same moment I see him. He slows. Stops. The streetlight catches the angles of his face—cheekbones, jaw, the dark eyes that I remember being warmer at the reception but that look different now, at night, on a dark street, with no crowd between us.

"Lucy?"

My name in his mouth. Spoken like a confirmation—like he already knew it was me, like he's been watching me come toward him for the past thirty seconds, and the question is a courtesy, not a genuine inquiry.

"Benedict." My voice is steady. That's training, not calm. "What are you doing here?"

"Bar around the corner. Friend's birthday." He gestures vaguely behind him. "I'm walking to my car."

It's plausible. There are bars around the corner. People do park on residential streets. But something about the answer sits wrong—too smooth, too ready, like a line that's been preparedin advance and is being delivered with just enough casualness to pass for spontaneous.

Or I'm a tired woman on a dark street, reading threat into everything because my nervous system is still humming from four hours of other people's emergencies. That's the more likely explanation. The clinical one.

"How are you?" he asks.

The question is simple. The way he asks it is not. He's standing very still—a particular kind of stillness that I register somewhere below conscious thought. Not tense. Not relaxed. *Watchful.* The stillness of something that's completely comfortable in the dark, that belongs here in a way I don't.

"Tired," I say.