Page 45 of Dark Billionaire Predator

Send.

I set the phone on my chest and stare at the ceiling. Christ watches from the apse below. The church is very quiet. The canal water is still.

The reply comes in three minutes.

You should wash your sheets.

I almost smile. The deflection—clinical, controlled, the kind of response a woman gives when the truth would be too much. But she didn't saydon't text me that.Didn't saythat's inappropriate.Saidyou should wash your sheets,which is advice she doesn't mean, delivered in a voice that's trying to be steady and isn't.

I'm not going to.

Thirty seconds.

I know.

Two words. She knows. She knows I'm lying in the evidence of her and she knows I'm not going to wash it away and she knows what that means—that I'm keeping her scent the way I kept the knowledge of her apartment, her books, her pillow. Possessively. Obsessively. The way I keep everything that's hers.

Where's the bruise?I type.

A pause. Longer than the others.

Which one?

The heat that moves through me at those two words—which one—is close to what I felt in the choir loft. She's not performing outrage. She's not pretending the marks don't exist. She's asking me to specify, which means she's been cataloging them, the way I cataloged the details of her apartment. She knows where each one is. She's been looking at them. Touching them.

The one on your throat.

It's visible. I'll need a scarf tomorrow.

The image—Lucy in her office on Monday, scarf wrapped around her neck, sitting across from clients who tell her abouttheir pain while the imprint of my teeth pulses beneath silk—does something to me that I'm not going to examine.

Good.

I mean it. I want the mark visible. I want her to feel it every time she swallows, every time she turns her head, every time she catches her own reflection. I want her to sit in her clinical chair and dispense professional wisdom about boundaries and healthy attachment while my bite throbs beneath her scarf.

She doesn't reply togood.The silence isn't rejection. It's the held breath I've learned to read—the woman processing, filing, deciding how much to give.

I let the silence sit for ten minutes. Then:

Where are you?

Home. Reading. Going for coffee like a normal person on a Sunday.

Where do you go for coffee?

Why?

I don't answer the question. She knows why.

A minute passes.

Café Reggio. MacDougal Street.

I'm in the car in under two minutes.

I drive north. Gowanus to the Village in eighteen minutes on a Sunday. I park on MacDougal, two blocks from the café. Walk. The November air is cold and bright—Sunday afternoon, the particular quality of winter light that makes everything look sharp-edged and overexposed. Daylight. I haven't seen Lucy in daylight since the wedding.

The café is small, old, the kind of place that's been in the Village longer than anyone currently alive. Dark wood, espresso machine, the atmosphere of a room that has absorbed seventy years of conversation and wears the residue like patina.