Page 101 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"No."

"Did he—"

"No. He talked. Sat in that chair and talked to me for an hour. About you. Your wall. Your father." She looks at me. Eyes wet, voice steady. "He wanted me to understand why. Like I was his therapist. Like even at the end, what he wanted most was for someone to see him."

I pull her against me. She comes—not collapsing, not breaking. Coming to me the way she does everything, deliberately, with her eyes open.

"I'm sorry," I say into her hair. "I'm sorry he used you. I'm sorry I brought this to your door—"

"Stop." Her hands come up—not pushing away. Holding on. Fingers gripping the front of my coat with a ferocity that doesn't match her clinical voice. "Just stop."

We stand in the dead man's living room. His books around us. His dishes in the rack. The evidence of a life lived in the margins—furnished carefully, maintained precisely, the home of a man who built himself a place because no one would build one for him.

Twelve years. The wall and the church and the question. And it ends here—in a house in Putnam County bought with silence money, standing over the body of a man who was never permitted to exist.

The silence after a kill. I know this silence—twelve times before, the emptiness that follows the taking of a life. The moment when the world holds its breath.

I don't break.

But something shifts. Not breaks—shifts. The way a foundation settles when the weight it's been carrying is finally removed. Twelve years of pressure, finding a new equilibrium.

It's over. The man who killed my father is dead. The question has been answered. The wall is complete.

I hold Lucy in the quiet house and breathe and let the settling happen.

Then I take out my phone.

Not Gabriel. Not Josiah.

Ezra St. Croix.

He picks up before the first ring finishes.

"It's done," I say.

"Done." Flat. "What does that mean?"

"He's dead."

Silence. The man who wanted to be in the room, processing the fact that it happened without him.

"You were supposed to wait."

"He took someone. I didn't have the luxury."

Another silence. Then, quieter: "My father. Did he—"

"Yes. Both of them. Your father and mine. Twelve years apart. Poison both times."

The sound Ezra makes is low. Not grief—not yet. Rage first. The cold, structural rage of a man who has just learned that the obligation he inherited and faithfully maintained was owed to the person who murdered his father. Every check he wrote. Every silence he kept. Every act of dutiful management—all of it in service to the man who took Dominic from him.

"I'll come to you," he says. His voice is different now. Stripped down to the iron underneath. "Where are you?"

I give him the address. Hang up.

Lucy is watching me. Her therapist's eyes. Seeing everything.

"What now?" she asks.