Page 33 of Dark Billionaire Predator

I stare at the screen. The cursor blinks. The apartment holds its breath around me. And I type the thing that has been sitting at the bottom of every thought I've had for three weeks, the sediment beneath the analysis and the fear and the clinical frameworks and the carefully maintained professional distance:

I haven't decided yet.

He doesn't reply.

I wait. One minute. Two. Five. The screen stays dark. No typing indicator. No buzz. Just silence—his silence now, not mine. The asymmetry of it is disorienting. For two days, I held the silence and he pushed against it. Now he's the one who's gone quiet, and the absence of his words is louder than any of the words he's sent.

He stopped. He gave me the last word. Whether that's strategy or something else—respect, restraint, the instinct of a man who knows when to stop pushing before the thing he wants breaks—I don't know. I don't know him well enough to read his silences the way I read his texts.

But I want to. That's the terrifying thing. I want to learn the grammar of his quiet the way I've learned the grammar of his pursuit. I want to know what it means when he stops talking. I want to know what his face looks like when he reads my words. I want to know if his hands are steady or shaking.

I want to know him. Not about him—him.The thing underneath the surveillance and the donation and the carefully engineered proximity. The man who sat in a break room and askedwhere does it come fromwith a voice that forgot to perform.

I set the phone on the nightstand. Screen down. The conversation sits in the device like something radioactive—contained but emitting, the half-life of those ten messages longer than anything I know how to calculate.

I replied. I engaged. I turned a one-way channel into a conversation. And the moment I did that, the last clinical framework I was holding—this is being done to me, I am the object of pursuit, I am not a willing participant—collapsed like a building with its foundation removed.

I am doing this now. Actively. With my eyes open. I told a man who has been surveilling me that his behavior doesn't bother me the way it should, and he told me that was the most honest thing anyone has said to him in years, and the exchange felt more intimate than any conversation I've had in longer than I want to calculate.

The lock is checked twice. The apartment is dark. The building settles. The radiator ticks.

And somewhere in Brooklyn—I don't know where, I don't know anything about him, he knows everything about me, and I am walking blind into whatever this is—a man is holding his phone and my last message is glowing on his screen.

I haven't decided yet.

Not yes. Not no. Notstop.Notcome closer.Just the truth—that I am standing in an open doorway, facing the dark, and I haven't decided which direction to step.

I press my hand against my left shoulder. The ghost of him. The burn that won't fade.

I close my eyes.

I haven't decided. But the fact that I'm still standing in the doorway—that I haven't stepped back, haven't closed it, haven't locked it the way I lock everything—tells me something about the decision I'm already making.

The one I can't take back.

Chapter 12 - Benedict

I haven't slept.

Her words are still on my phone screen, four of them, glowing in the dark of the choir loft like something radioactive.I haven't decided yet.I've been lying here for hours with the phone on my chest, feeling the weight of it, and the words are doing something to me that I don't recognize.

I didn't reply. This is the part I can't account for. I always reply. I always push. I fill silences the way I fill doorways—completely, deliberately, leaving no room for retreat. It's what I do. It's what I am. And when Lucy Anderson told me she hadn't decided yet, something in me stopped.

Not strategy. Not calculation. Something older and less legible. The instinct of an animal that has cornered its prey and recognizes, in the instant before the kill, that killing isn't what it wants.

I don't hold back. I have never held back. The fact that four words from this woman stopped me when nothing else has—not Gabriel, not the Brotherhood, not twelve years of hunting my father's killer—tells me something I'm not ready to hear.

I get up. Dress in the dark. It's barely dawn, the canal water black beneath the windows. I have a meeting at the manor at ten—Gabriel's summons, delivered by text last night in the clipped syntax he uses when he's displeased.Family meeting. 10 AM. Don't be late.Gabriel doesn't sayI've noticed you're distracted.He doesn't need to. The summons is the statement.

***

The manor. Gabriel in the study, standing by the window with his back to the room—the posture he adopts when he wants you to know he's thinking about you before he turns to face you. Josiah is there. The family configuration that means this is about operations, not ceremony.

Gabriel turns. Looks at me with the particular attention he gives to things he's concerned about, which is not the same as the attention he gives to things he's angry about. Anger from Gabriel is cold and efficient. Concern is worse—it's warm, almost paternal, and it carries the implication that you've become a problem he needs to solve rather than a brother he can rely on.

"The Portland trip," he says.

I go still. "What about it?"