Page 103 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"Okay," she says carefully. "Are you safe?"

"Yes. He's here. He's in the next room."

"Luce, it's four in the morning. What happened?"

I tell her. Not everything—not the kill, not the knife, not the body on the floor of a house in Putnam County. I tell her what I can: that someone came after Benedict through me, that Benedict found me, that it's over now and I'm home and I'm not hurt. I tell her that I broke it off six days ago because I diagnosed us—used every framework I have, named every pattern, prescribed separation like a clinician treating a case study instead of a woman losing the first person who has ever made her feel held.

"I was right about the patterns," I say. "I was clinically correct about every single one. And I don't care."

Ava is quiet for a long time.

"You remember what I told you," she says. "About choosing Josiah."

"I chose full over safe." My sister's words, handed back to her.

"Full over safe," she repeats. "And I meant it, Luce. I mean it every day. But I need you to hear something, okay? Choosing full doesn't mean choosing blind. It means choosing with your eyes open. You see him—really see him, what he is, what he does—and you choose anyway. That's not a trauma bond. That's a decision."

"The literature would disagree."

"The literature hasn't met the Ambrose brothers." A pause. I hear something that might be Josiah's voice in the background, a low murmur, Ava's hand over the phone for a moment. Then she's back. "Josiah says tell Benedict if he ever puts you in danger again, it won't be Benedict he has to worry about. It'll be me."

I almost laugh. Don't quite make it.

"Lucy." Ava's voice changes—softer now. Not the prosecutor. The sister. The girl who held my hand at our mother's funeral and our father's funeral and every funeral after. "You have spent your entire adult life holding other people's pain. You hold it at work, you hold it at the center, you hold it for your clients and your colleagues and strangers who call a crisis line at two in the morning. And you never let anyone hold yours. You carry it alone because you decided somewhere along the waythat your job is to be the strong one, the steady one, the one who doesn't need."

"Ava—"

"Let him hold it. If he's the one—and you're telling me he is—then let him hold some of it. You don't have to carry everything alone anymore. That's what full means. It means someone else is in the room."

I'm crying. I don't know when it started—the tears just there, running down my face in the dark kitchen, the phone pressed to my ear, my sister's voice the only sound in the world.

"I love you," I say.

"I love you too. Go be with him. And call me later when it's not four in the morning and tell me everything."

I hang up. Stand in the kitchen. Let the tears finish.

Then I go to the living room.

Benedict is on the sofa. He's taken off his coat—folded it, laid it on the chair by the door, the blood-stained sleeve hidden. The knife is somewhere I can't see. Without the coat he looks smaller, which is an illusion—he's not small, he's lean and precise and built for the kind of violence I watched him commit three hours ago. But without the coat and the knife and the operational stillness, he looks like a man sitting on a sofa in a cold apartment, waiting for a woman to decide what happens next.

He's been waiting for me to decide since the night we met. I see that now. For all the surveillance, the lock-picking, the uninvited entries—he has always been waiting for me to choose. He built the conditions. He engineered the access. But he waited, every time, for me to step toward him. The doorway of the crisiscenter. The choir loft. The car. Every threshold was mine to cross.

This one too.

I sit next to him. Not across from him, not at a clinical distance. Next to him, close enough that our shoulders touch.

"I broke up with you because I couldn't tell if what I felt was real or conditioned," I say.

"I know."

"I can tell now."

He turns his head. Looks at me. The charm is gone—not deployed, not held in reserve. Gone. What's left is the face underneath, the one I've been catching glimpses of since that first conversation. The unperformed face. The one that is afraid of exactly one thing in the world, and the thing is sitting next to him on this sofa.

"I love you," I say. "That's not a diagnosis. It's not a pattern. It's not a clinical observation. I love you and I know exactly what you are and I am choosing you with my eyes open."

He doesn't move for a long time. Long enough that I start to wonder if I've broken something—if the words are too much, if the man who deals in surveillance and silence and the careful management of distance doesn't know what to do with something this direct.