Page 96 of Dark Billionaire Predator

The session ends. I offer him resources—a therapist referral, a hotline number. He takes them politely. Thanks me. Stands.

"I didn't catch your name," I say.

"I didn't give one." He smiles. The smile is perfect—warm, self-deprecating, the smile of a man who knows the rules and is gently declining to follow them. "The policy here doesn't require it, does it?"

"No. It doesn't."

"Then let's leave it at that. Thank you, Lucy."

He knows my name. I'm wearing a name tag—the crisis center requires them. So it's not remarkable that he knows it. But the way he says it—Lucy—with a slight emphasis, a fractional pause before the word, as if he's tasting it. As if the name is information he already had and is now confirming.

He leaves. The door closes behind him. I sit in the empty room and the wrongness doesn't leave with him. It stays in thechair where he sat, in the air he breathed, in the quality of attention he left behind like a residue.

I clean up. Lock the center. Step outside into the February night—cold, dark, the East Village street quiet at this hour. I pull my coat tight and start walking toward the subway and the feeling follows me.

Being watched.

Not Benedict's warmth. Not the heated focus of a man who watches because he wants. Something else. Colder. The sensation of eyes on my back that are calculating rather than desiring, assessing rather than admiring. The feeling of being studied by someone who has already decided what you are and is now confirming the details.

I look over my shoulder once. The street is empty. A parked car, dark windows. A man walking a dog on the far sidewalk. Nothing out of place.

I walk to the subway. Ride home. Climb the stairs to my apartment. The hallway is quiet—my neighbors behind their doors, the building settling into its nighttime rhythms, the familiar sounds of a place I've lived for three years.

I reach for my keys.

The deadbolts turn.

From the inside.

My hand freezes on the key ring. The sound—the mechanical sequence of tumblers disengaging, one lock and then the other—is the sound I've heard a dozen times over the past few weeks. The sound that meant Benedict. The sound my body was trained to respond to with heat and anticipation, and the particular relief of a woman whose person has arrived.

He made another copy, I think. Of course he did. He's Benedict—the man who copies keys the way other men copy phone numbers, as a contingency, as an insurance policy against the possibility of being locked out. He said he'd give me space. But his version of space has always included the ability to close the distance whenever he decides the space has lasted long enough.

The door opens.

The man standing in my doorway is not Benedict.

He's the man from the crisis center. The composed eyes, the pleasant voice, the perfect smile. Standing in my apartment, in my hallway, with my locks open and my lights off behind him, and an expression on his face that isn't performing anything anymore.

"Hello, Lucy," he says. "We need to talk about Benedict Ambrose."

Chapter 32 - Benedict

Ezra picked up on the second ring. The conversation lasted four minutes. Most of what mattered was in the silences—the places where the eldest St. Croix son didn't deny what I was suggesting, didn't confirm it, just let the quiet do the work that words would make too real.

He knows what his father was hiding. Has known for years. When I told him I'd traced the payments, the trust, the concealment, he didn't flinch. He's lived with this knowledge. Made his peace with it the way eldest sons make peace with inherited messes—by controlling them.

But when I pushed further—when I connected what Dominic was hiding to my father's death, when I saidhave you considered that whoever is at the end of these payments might have had a reason to want both our fathers dead—the silence changed texture. Not fear. Something harder. The silence of a man doing arithmetic he doesn't want to finish.

"Say that again." His voice had dropped. Compressed. The sound of something being held under pressure.

I said it again. Laid it out—not everything, not the two words on my wall, but enough. The timeline. The proximity. The question no one had thought to ask because no one knew there was someone to ask it about.

I could hear it happen—the recalculation. Ezra St. Croix is not a man who misses things. He's the one who held his family together after Dominic died, who inherited every obligation along with the name. He's been running an equation for years—money in, silence out, problem contained. And now I've added a variable he never considered, and the answer is making him angry in the specific way that powerful men get angry whenthey realize they've been managing something that was, in fact, managing them.

"Where." Not a question. A demand.

"I'm working on it."