Page 47 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"That's not okay."

"I know."

She stares at me. I hold the gaze. The café hums around us—other people, other conversations, the espresso machine, the Sunday-afternoon noise of a city that doesn't know or care that two people at a corner table are negotiating the terms of something that has no precedent in either of their lives.

"You can't do that," she says. "You can't walk into a room and—radiate whatever that was—and expect me to—"

"I don't expect anything. I told you what it was. I couldn't watch him talk to you. That's not a policy. It's a fact."

"It's a problem."

"Probably."

The anger holds for another five seconds. I watch it—the set of her mouth, the tightness in her jaw, the rigid posture of a woman who has every right to be furious and is fully committed to the fury. She is magnificent when she's angry. I thought this at the crisis center and I think it now, in daylight, across a café table, with her scarf hiding my mark and her eyes burning into mine.

Then something shifts. Not the anger dissolving—it doesn't dissolve. But something else joining it. The thing I saw in the doorway, in the church, in the choir loft. The thing that lives next to her anger and is indistinguishable from it. Her pulse is visible at her temple. Her hand, resting on the table beside her book, has a fine tremor.

"You're aroused," I say. Quietly. A clinical observation delivered in the language she speaks.

"Don't."

"You're angry at me and you're aroused and both of those things are true and you hate that they are."

"I said don't."

I reach across the table. Put my hand over hers. The tremor stops. Her skin is warm from the coffee cup and her fingers are tense and I hold her hand on the table in a café on MacDougal Street in the Sunday-afternoon light and it's the most intimate thing I've done since the choir loft. More intimate than sex. More intimate than the bite. Because this is daylight. This is public. This is two people touching in a room full of other people, and the touch isn't hidden or deniable or masked by darkness.

She doesn't pull her hand away.

We sit like that for a long time. My hand over hers. The book open between us. The coffee cooling. The café noise washing over us like water.

"Tell me about the scars," she says. Finally. Not the clinical voice. Not the crisis center assessment. The voice of a woman who is holding a man's hand in a coffee shop and wants to know what she's holding.

"Which ones?"

"The one on your ribs. The old one."

I run my thumb over her knuckles. Feel the fine bones, the tendons. The hands that hold other people's pain for a living.

"A knife," I say. "A long time ago."

"How long?"

"I was twenty-two."

"Who did it?"

"Someone who isn't alive anymore."

She absorbs this. I watch her process—not with horror, not with the clinical distance. With the quiet, steady attention ofa woman who has been sitting with other people's violence for years and is now sitting with mine.

"And the one on your shoulder?"

"Different knife. Different night."

"How many different nights have there been?"

I look at her. The question underneath the question. She's not asking about scars anymore. She's asking about the wall. About the church. About the man who lives in a ruin and has a body built for damage and documents pinned to the wall in the dark.