Page 28 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"Can I help you?"

"My name is Benedict Ambrose. Edward Ambrose was my father."

He stops walking.

I watch the name land. Watch it move through him—not like a blow, more like a tide. Something that comes in slowly and fills everything. His face doesn't change in any way a casual observer would notice. But I'm not a casual observer, and what I see is recognition. Old, deep, the kind that's been waiting.

"I was wondering when one of you would show up," he says.

***

The bar is on the waterfront. A place called Beckett's—dark wood, low light, half-empty at four in the afternoon. The kind of place where nobody listens because nobody cares. Gideon orders a beer. I order whiskey. We sit in a booth by the window, looking out at the harbor where the fishing boats are coming in, and we size each other up with the practiced discretion of two men who were raised in families where sizing people up is a survival skill.

"What do you want?" he asks. Not hostile. Direct.

"I want to know what happened between your father and mine. Before my father died."

"That was eleven years ago."

"Twelve. And I've been patient."

He almost smiles. It changes his face—softens the St. Croix architecture into something warmer, more human. "You don't look patient."

"I'm not. I've just been distracted."

He drinks. Sets the glass down. Studies me over the rim with an expression I can't fully read—not trust, not suspicion, something between the two. The expression of a man deciding how much to give a stranger who shares his particular kind of damage.

"I don't know what you're looking for," he says. "I want to be clear about that. I don't have answers. What I have is a conversation with my father, six months before he died, that I've never been able to forget."

"Tell me."

He turns the glass in his hands. "My father told me that your father had confronted him about something. Somethingpersonal. Something from my father's past that yours had uncovered."

"What was it?"

"He wouldn't say. Called it a private matter between the two of them. He was frustrated—that was the tone. Not scared, not desperate. Frustrated. Like an old friend was making a mountain out of something my father thought should have stayed buried."

"Edward was making it bigger than it needed to be."

"That's almost exactly what he said." Gideon looks at me. "Your father found something in my father's past and decided it mattered. My father disagreed. Three weeks later, your father was dead."

The words sit between us. The harbor light shifts—clouds moving, the gray deepening toward the early dark of a New England November.

"You asked Ezra about it," I say. Not a question.

The glass stops turning. "How do you know that?"

"Because it's what I would have done."

He's quiet for a long time. Then: "I asked Ezra two years after my father died. I thought enough time had passed. I was wrong."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing. That was the point." Gideon's voice changes—not louder, not harder, just more precise. The voice of a man recalling something that cut cleanly. "Ezra didn't explain. Didn't deny. Didn't discuss. He looked at me and saidthis isn't a conversation we're having,and the subject ceased to exist. Like he'd closed a door and bricked it over."

"And that's why you left."

"That's part of why I left." He finishes the beer. Doesn't order another. "My brother is sitting on whatever our father was hiding, and he has no intention of sharing it with anyone. Not me, not Malachi, not Sera, not Lazarus. Ezra decides what the family knows and what it doesn't. Staying meant accepting that. I couldn't."