Page 42 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"What is that?" she asks. Her voice is rough. Used.

"Something I'm working on."

"That's not an answer."

"No."

She's quiet for a long moment. Then: "You live in a church. You have a wall covered in documents and photographs. You have scars that don't come from rock climbing."

I don't say anything. Let her work. This is what she does—she reads, she assembles, she builds a picture from fragments. She's been doing it to me since the wedding. The difference is that now she has more data.

"Who are you?" she asks. Not the question she asked at the crisis center—what are you doing.This is deeper. This is the question underneath all the other questions, the one she's been circling since she saw me across the reception hall.

"I'm the man who just fucked you in a church," I say. "The rest can wait."

She doesn't push. Not tonight. She lies back and stares at the ceiling and the colored light moves across her skin, and she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and the most dangerous and I am in more trouble than I have ever been in my life.

She gets up. Dresses. I watch her—the reverse of undressing, the methodical reconstruction of the woman who walked through my door. Jeans, sweater, coat. Hair gathered and twisted. The armor going back on, piece by piece.

"I should go," she says.

I don't ask her to stay. The words are in my mouth—stay, sleep here, let me learn the sound of your breathing—but I don't say them. Because asking her to stay would be need, and need is a weapon I'm not ready to hand her.

"I'll call you a car."

She nods. We don't touch. The distance between us is back—not the old distance, not the surveillance distance. Something new. The distance of two people who have seen each other completely and are deciding what to do with the seeing.

She goes down the stairs. I hear her footsteps cross the nave. The church door opens and closes.

I lie in the choir loft. The sheets smell like her now—warm skin, shampoo, sex. The scent fills the narrow bed, fills the loft, fills the church. It will be here for days. It will be here every time I close my eyes.

I got what I wanted. I've been saying that after every move—the street, the donation, the tour, the kiss. I got what I wanted. And every time, the getting has made the wanting worse.

This time is no different. This time is worse than all the others combined. Because now I know what it sounds like when Lucy Anderson says my name with my body inside hers, andno amount of surveillance or strategy or patience will ever be enough to replace the sound of it.

She's gone. The church is empty. Christ watches from the apse.

I press my face into the pillow where her head was and I breathe her in and I understand, finally, that this woman is going to destroy me. Not with clinical precision. Not with the professional distance she's been wielding like a scalpel. With the thing underneath all of that—the raw, unperforming, undefended thing that I felt in the dark when her body moved against mine and her mouth opened under mine and she said my name like it was the only word she knew.

She's going to destroy me and I'm going to let her.

That's the decision I've made. Standing in the doorway was hers. This one is mine.

Chapter 15 - Lucy

The taxi crosses the Gowanus Canal and I watch the water disappear behind us—black, still, reflecting nothing—and I think: I just had sex in a church with a man who has been stalking me for three weeks.

The thought should land with the force of a diagnosis. Should trigger the clinical alarm system that has been running, however faintly, since the night on the street. Should produce the cascade of professional self-recrimination that any therapist would feel after crossing every boundary she's spent a decade teaching her clients to maintain.

It doesn't. The thought lands softly, almost gently, and settles beside the other things I'm carrying in the back of this taxi—the ache in my thighs, the tenderness at my wrists, the raw patch on my throat where his teeth marked me, the deep soreness between my legs that pulses with every bump in the road and sends a secondary wave of sensation through me that is not pain and is not pleasure and is not anything I have a clinical name for.

I don't think. Not yet. The thinking will come—I can feel it assembling in the back of my mind, the clinician warming up, preparing to process what just happened through every framework I own. But right now the frameworks are offline. Right now, there is only the body and its memory and the dark city scrolling past the taxi window and the smell of him still on my skin.

Stone. Cold water. Sweat. Something underneath all three that is purely Benedict—a scent I first encountered in a narrow hallway and have now encountered in every possiblevariation, in every degree of proximity, and which I will never be able to unknow.

Blue door. Vestibule. Stairs. Lock. Once. Twice.

The apartment is the same. That's the disorienting thing—the absolute sameness of everything. The couch, the bookshelf, the single wine glass in the rack. The stack of books on the nightstand. The lavender dress in the closet. Everything in its place, undisturbed, as if the woman who lives here has been home all evening, reading about trauma and drinking wine and checking her locks like she always does.