Page 1 of Dark Billionaire Predator

Prologue - Benedict

I see her for the first time at my brother's wedding, and something inside me catches fire.

Not the slow burn I've watched consume Gabriel and Josiah—those careful, calculated obsessions that built over weeks and months, winding tighter until they couldn't breathe without the women they'd chosen. No. This is different. This is instantaneous. A match struck against the dry kindling of a life I've spent thirty years hollowing out.

She's standing near the rose arch, champagne glass in hand, laughing at something Poppy just said. The late afternoon light catches her face at an angle that makes the world tilt—dark hair falling loose past her shoulders, a smile that transforms her entire face from pretty to devastating. She's wearing a lavender dress that moves when she moves, soft and flowing, nothing like the armor her sister wears. Where Ava is sharp edges and steel, this woman is all warmth. Open. Unguarded.

Dangerous.

Lucy Anderson. Ava's younger sister. The therapist. The one who warned Ava about trauma bonding, who spent months suspicious of Josiah, who sat through this wedding with watchful eyes and a careful smile that never quite reached full trust.

I've known her name for months. Seen photographs in Josiah's files, heard her mentioned in conversations, cataloged her as a peripheral figure in my brother's love story. Ava's sister. The cautious one. The worrier.

I never paid attention. Never had a reason to.

I'm paying attention now.

She touches people when she talks to them. I notice that first—the way her hand finds a forearm, a shoulder, the small of someone's back. Not calculated. Not strategic. Just instinct, the unconscious reaching out of someone who connects through contact. She does it with Poppy, with the guests she's just met, with the string quartet's cellist during a break between sets. Each touch is brief and genuine, and each person she touches leans toward her afterward, drawn in, warmed.

I know what she does for a living. She's a therapist. She sits with people's pain for hours, days, years. She holds space for the worst of what people carry and helps them set it down. It's her job, her vocation, her fundamental orientation toward the world: I see you. I hear you. You're not alone.

Something about that makes my chest tight.

I watch her from across the reception, half-hidden behind my best-man duties. I pour champagne. I make my toast—charming, sardonic, the performance everyone expects. I catch Gabriel's eye and receive his approving nod. I clap Josiah on the shoulder and tell him not to fuck it up. I dance with Poppy, holding Iris between us while she babbles and yanks at my tie.

And the whole time, my eyes keep finding Lucy.

She moves through the reception like someone used to being in rooms full of strangers—comfortable but observant, present but watchful. The therapist's gaze. She's reading the room the way I read rooms, except where I'm looking for threats and leverage, she's looking for something else. Connection. Understanding. The quiet signals people send when they think no one is paying attention.

What would she see if she looked at me?

The thought arrives like a knife between the ribs.

I know what most people see: Benedict Ambrose, youngest brother, charming wastrel, the one with the sharp tongue and the devil-may-care smile. I've spent three decades constructing that image—layering it on like paint, coat after coat, until the thing underneath is buried so deep that even my brothers can't find it.

Gabriel thinks he knows me. Sees the deflection, the restlessness, the refusal to commit, and diagnoses it as loneliness. As the predictable damage of a youngest son growing up in the shadow of two formidable older brothers. He's not wrong, exactly. But he's not right either. He sees the symptom, not the disease.

Josiah comes closer. He told me once that I was an expert on self-destruction, and I laughed because he meant it as an insult and didn't realize it was the most accurate thing anyone had ever said about me. But even Josiah doesn't know the half of it. He thinks my self-destruction is passive—the isolation, the revolving door of women I never let stay past morning. He doesn't know about the other thing. The active thing. The thing I do in the dark when the pressure builds, and the noise in my head becomes unbearable.

Nobody knows about that.

Eleven years. That's how long I've been carrying a suspicion so heavy it's reshaped my skeleton, curved my spine around it, made me into a man who smiles while he's drowning. Since I was nineteen, since the night I stood over my father's open casket and looked down at his face and knew—not thought, not suspected, butknew—that the heart attack story was a lie.

I couldn't prove it then. Still can't. But the feeling has never left. A splinter lodged beneath the skin, impossible to reach, impossible to ignore. Eleven years of watching the menwho attended his funeral, the men who shook my hand and told me what a great man Edward Ambrose was, and wondering which of them put him in the ground.

But right now, watching Lucy Anderson laugh in the golden light, I feel something I haven't felt in so long I barely recognize it.

Want.

Not the transactional way I want women—brief, impersonal, a body in the dark that I can lose myself in for an hour before the emptiness returns. Not even the way I want violence, that terrible craving that builds like weather until I have no choice but to let it break.

This is something else. Something that has no name, no category, no box I can file it in and forget about.

I want to know what her hair smells like. I want to hear the sound she makes when she laughs—really laughs, not the polite reception version. I want to sit across from her in a quiet room and answer her questions, all of them, even the ones that would destroy me.

I want her to look at me with those warm, perceptive eyes and see something worth seeing.

It's absurd. It's terrifying. It's the most alive I've felt in years.