Page 3 of Dark Billionaire Predator

The information flows in, and I drink it like water. Every detail, every data point, every piece of the puzzle that is this woman who looked at me across a crowded room and made me feel, for one electric moment, like I was worth looking at.

It's not enough. It's nowhere near enough.

I want more. I want everything. I want to know what she eats for breakfast, what she reads before bed, and what she looks like at three in the morning when the world is quiet and she's the only person awake. I want to know her habits, her routines, her fears. The sound of her voice when she's angry. The shape of her mouth when she's sad. The way she breathes when she sleeps.

I want to know everything about Lucy Anderson.

And then I want to own it.

The thought should horrify me. Would horrify me if I were capable of that particular emotion anymore. But horror is a luxury for people who still believe in boundaries, and I stopped believing in those a long time ago. My brothers fell in love like civilized men—obsessive, yes. Stalkers, absolutely. But there was a framework to their madness, a structure. Gabriel calculated. Josiah haunted. They knew what they were doing, even when what they were doing was monstrous.

I don't calculate. I don't haunt. I burn.

And Lucy Anderson has just become the center of the fire.

I close the browser. Set down my phone. Stare at my father's portrait in the dark.

Two obsessions. Two hunts. The truth about who killed Edward Ambrose—a truth I've been chasing in the dark for eleven years, and may now finally have a light for. And the woman who made me feel alive for the first time since I canremember. Both dangerous. Both consuming. Both likely to destroy me if I'm not careful.

I'm not careful. I've never been careful. It's the thing my brothers love about me and the thing that terrifies them. Gabriel plans. Josiah controls. Benedict ignites—and the people around him either bask in the warmth or burn.

Tomorrow, I'll start pulling the thread Vanderwal gave me. Follow the name, see where it leads, find out if eleven years of suspicion can finally become eleven years of certainty.

But first—before the old business, before the Brotherhood, before any of it—I'm going to find Lucy Anderson. Not approach her. Not yet. Just... find her. Learn her. Map the geography of her life the way I mapped the geography of her face tonight, cataloging every detail, committing it to a memory that refuses to let go.

She looked at me tonight. Just once, just for a moment. But in that moment, I saw something in her eyes that I recognized.

Curiosity. The same dangerous curiosity that makes her good at her job—the need to understand, to unravel, to see what's hiding beneath the surface.

She wants to know what's behind my mask.

Part of me hopes she never finds out.

The rest of me can't wait.

I close my phone, set it face down on the table, and head upstairs. The hallway is dark, the house silent except for the settling of old wood and the distant sound of wind against the windows. I pass Josiah's door—closed, quiet, his new wife asleep beside him. I pass Gabriel's door—the faintest sound ofIris murmuring in her crib, the gentle rhythm of a lullaby Poppy hums without thinking.

My brothers. Settled. Safe. Whole, in ways they never expected to be.

I reach my own room. The guest room, really—I haven't slept here in years, not since I bought the church. But tonight it felt wrong to leave. Tonight, the manor's ghosts feel closer than usual, and my father's portrait is still watching from the library below, and something about this night feels like a hinge. A before and after.

I lie in the dark and think about Lucy Anderson.

About the converted church waiting for me in Gowanus, its empty nave and colored shadows. About how I've been filling that silence with violence and solitude for six years, and how tonight, for the first time, I can imagine filling it with something else.

Someone else.

I close my eyes.

And I start to plan.

Chapter 1 - Lucy

The woman sitting across from me has been talking about her mother for forty-five minutes.

I know this because I glanced at the clock when she started, and it's become one of those sessions—the kind where the client circles the same wound from different angles, getting closer each time but never quite touching it. Rebecca does this. She'll approach the center of her pain, feel the heat of it, and veer away into a tangent about work or her boyfriend or the barista who got her order wrong. Anything to avoid direct contact.

I don't push. Not today. She's closer than she was last week, and sometimes the approach matters more than the arrival.