Page 100 of Dark Billionaire Predator

Caspian's smile returns. Wider.

"Ezra knows I exist. Found the records after Dominic died. He's been managing me since—checks, distance, silence. Same playbook. But no. He doesn't know I killed our father. He thinks the cancer did it. He thinks I'm an inconvenience he inherited." He looks at me steadily. "He doesn't know I killed yours either."

The words settle into the room.

"Now you know everything," Caspian says. "The wall is complete. Twelve years, answered."

"Why tell me? Why not just kill me and disappear?"

"Because I'm tired." The performance drops completely. What's underneath isn't rage—it's exhaustion. The bone-deep fatigue of a man who has been surviving for thirty-four years and has never been permitted to live. "Tired of the checks and the silence. Tired of Ezra's lawyers. I want it to end. You're the last one asking questions. After you, the secret stays buried. And I go back to being no one."

He reaches behind the armchair. A knife—long, thin, made for use.

"I watched you for two weeks," he says, standing. "After you visited Cates. After New Haven. I followed your investigation the way you followed it. And I went to Lucy because I wanted you angry. Reckless. Here, without your brothers, without backup, without the discipline that's kept you alive through twelve kills. You're good, Benedict. But you're emotional right now, and emotional men make mistakes."

I let the knife drop from my sleeve into my hand. The Benchmade. Five inches, balanced, familiar as my own fingers.

"You're right," I say. "I'm emotional."

He moves first. A thrust aimed at my midsection—technically competent, the attack of a man who learned to fight out of necessity. Self-taught, alone, in the margins. The skills a St. Croix son would have been given from birth, but a bastard had to build for himself.

I sidestep. The blade passes six inches from my ribs. I rotate, close the distance, cut his forearm—shallow, precise, theopening line of a conversation I've been having with oak beams for twelve years.

He's fast. Faster than I expected—recovers, pivots, creates distance. The second thrust is better, adjusted, aimed higher. I block with my forearm, absorb the impact against the handle, drive my elbow into his jaw. He staggers. Doesn't fall.

"You're better than me," he says. Blood on his arm, his lip. "I knew you would be. You had the training. The family. The name."

"I had a dead father and a wall."

"We have that in common."

He comes again. Different now—desperate, committed, the attack of a man who has decided that winning isn't the point. He's not trying to kill me anymore. He's trying to end something. His death or mine, as long as the silence breaks.

I understand it. God help me, I understand it. The exhaustion of carrying a secret so long it becomes your skeleton.

But Lucy is on the sofa with zip ties on her wrists, and she is alive, and I am not going to let this man take one more thing from me.

He overcommits on a lunge—the gap between instinct and discipline—and I step inside his reach, trap his knife arm against my body, and put the Benchmade through his side. Below the ribs. Deep.

A breath. Not a scream. The breath of a man who has been holding something for thirty-four years and is finally letting it go.

I lower him to the floor. The eyes that held nothing are full now. The glass shattered. Everything pouring through.

"The Brotherhood," he says. Voice thin. "You think this is one family's secret. One bastard. It's not. The founding families—all of them—they have closets, Benedict. People like me. Children they hid. Obligations they buried. The silence goes deeper than you know."

"Names."

Blood on his teeth. "You'll have to find them the way you found me." A cough. "Tell Ezra. Tell him his father didn't die of cancer. Tell him the brother he's been writing checks to is the one who put the poison in the IV. I want him to know. I want someone in that family to understand what it costs to pretend a person doesn't exist."

His eyes find Lucy.

"I'm sorry about her," he says. "She wasn't part of this. She was just the string I needed to pull."

Then the light goes out.

I cut the zip ties with the Benchmade. Lucy doesn't flinch from the blade—watches it with the steady attention she gives everything, the clinician who never turns off even when her wrists are raw, and her hands are shaking.

"Are you hurt?"