Page 6 of Dark Billionaire Predator

It's nothing. A feeling—not even that. A shadow of a feeling, like the air in the apartment has shifted by one degree. The hairs on the back of my neck lift, and I stand very still with my hand on the lamp switch and something tightens in my stomach.

I look at the window. The curtains are open—I usually close them before bed, but I haven't yet, and the glass reflects the room back at me, my own face pale and wide-eyed. Beyond my reflection, the street. The building across the way. A streetlight. A parked car. The ginkgo tree, its leaves beginning to turn.

Nothing. There's nothing there.

I close the curtains. Pull them tight until the edges overlap and no gap remains. My hands are steady—I'm not afraid, not really. It's just a feeling. The kind of thing that happens when you live alone and the apartment gets too quiet and your nervous system, with nothing external to process, starts inventing things to worry about.

Hypervigilance, I would tell a client. Your body is scanning for threats because that's what bodies do. It doesn't mean the threat is real.

I turn off the light. Get into bed.

But I lie there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, listening to the building—the creak of pipes, the murmur of a television through the wall, someone's music two floors up.

And beneath it all, so faint I might be imagining it, the feeling of being watched.

Chapter 2 - Benedict

Two weeks.

That's how long I've been watching her. Fourteen days of mapping the geography of Lucy Anderson's life with the same precision I'd use to plan an operation—except this isn't an operation. Operations have objectives, exit strategies, clearly defined parameters of success and failure. This has none of those things.

This is just me, sitting in a rented car on West 10th Street at seven in the morning, waiting for a woman I've never spoken to to emerge from her building so I can follow her to work.

She comes out at seven-fifteen. Same time every day—I've clocked it. Navy coat, bag slung across her body, hair pulled back in a low knot that exposes the line of her neck. She pauses on the stoop to check her phone, frowns at something on the screen, then starts walking.

West on 10th. Left on Greenwich. Right on Sixth Avenue to the coffee shop on the corner of Waverly—medium oat milk latte, no variation. She thanks the barista by name. Sophia. She knows the barista's name because of course she does, because Lucy Anderson remembers people, sees people, treats every human interaction like it matters.

I watch from across the street. She doesn't see me. She never sees me. I'm good at this—better than my brothers, though they'd never admit it. Josiah stalks the way he kills: methodically, with grinding patience. I stalk the way I do everything else—by hiding in plain sight. Different car every morning from the Brotherhood's fleet. Dark coat, good shoes, a face that saysI belong hereeven when I don't belong anywhere.

I know her clients now—the anxious marketing director on Mondays and Thursdays, the divorced man on Tuesdays and Fridays, the teenager with the panicking mother on Wednesday afternoons. I know when she eats lunch at her desk, when she stands at her third-floor window and stares out at the street with an expression I can't read from this distance but desperately want to understand. I know she volunteers at a crisis center on Tuesday evenings, that she reads in the wine bar on Fridays, that she checks her phone for texts from Ava with a frequency that suggests she's worried about her sister even now that Ava has a husband and a new last name.

I know she lives alone. That her apartment light goes off around eleven most nights. That she checks her door lock twice before bed—I've watched her shadow move behind the curtains, the same small ritual, consistent and human and ordinary in a way that makes my chest ache.

Fourteen days, and I've built a more complete dossier on this woman than I have on most Brotherhood targets.

I could do this normally. Ask Ava for her number, engineer a meeting through family channels. But normal channels aren't what I want.

What I want is to know her before she knows me. To understand the shape of her life before I step into it and change it forever. Because I will change it. Whatever I touch, I alter. Whatever I want, I consume.

So I watch. And I wait. And I learn.

***

The church is cold when I get back.

It's always cold—stone walls, vaulted ceilings, the fundamental inability of a building designed for spiritual contemplation to retain heat in a Brooklyn winter. I bought it six years ago from the Archdiocese. Deconsecrated, abandoned, slowly rotting. I stripped out the pews, built a bedroom in the choir loft, and a kitchen in the sacristy. Left the rest alone—the nave, the apse with its cracked mosaic of Christ in glory, the stained glass windows that throw fractured color across the stone floor when the light is right. A cathedral of emptiness. A monument to the kind of faith I've never had.

Outside, the Gowanus Canal sits dark and still, carrying its poison to the sea.

I make espresso in the sacristy kitchen, carry it to the one chair in the nave—a leather wingback that looks absurd beneath the vaulted ceiling, like a throne in a tomb—and pull out my phone.

Two obsessions. Two hunts. I've been neglecting the second one.

Three days before the wedding, Bryan Vanderwal cornered me after a council meeting. Ninety-three years old, sharp as a razor, the last surviving co-founder of the Brotherhood. He and my father built this organization together.

He pressed a folded paper into my hand. "The St. Croix family," he said. "Dominic St. Croix and your father had history. Bad history. The kind that doesn't stay buried forever."

Another founding dynasty—allied with the Ambroses for generations but always in quiet competition. Dominic St. Croix, dead five years from cancer, had been my father's closest friend and most dangerous rival.