Page 63 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"What's on the nightstand?"

"A cup of tea I forgot to drink. A book I'm not reading. And now you."

A pause. I can hear him breathing—slow, steady, the controlled respiration of a man who is very good at managing his body. But there's something in the breath. A heaviness. The sound of someone lying in the dark in a cold church in Gowanus with a wall of evidence ten feet away, and the only warm thing in his evening is a voice on the phone.

"How was your day?" I ask.

He laughs. Short, surprised—like the question is absurd in context. Like no one has asked him that in a very long time, or like the people who ask don't actually want the answer.

"Long," he says. "Gabriel wants me to meet someone at dinner on Saturday. A man named Cates—manages money for families in our circle. Gabriel dropped the introduction like it was casual, which means it isn't."

"Why does that bother you?"

"Because Gabriel doesn't do casual. Every person at that table will be there for a reason, positioned for a purpose. Including me. Including you, although he doesn't know that yet."

"He doesn't know I'm coming?"

"He knows Ava's sister is coming. He doesn't know what Ava's sister is to me." A beat. "Neither do I, entirely."

The words land in the dark of my apartment and settle. I let them. I don't fill the space with reassurance or definition or the clinical frameworks that would make this easier to categorize. I let the not-knowing sit between us because it's honest, and honesty from Benedict Ambrose is rare enough to deserve silence.

"What role does he want you to play Saturday?" I ask instead.

"The charming brother. The one who makes people feel comfortable. Who drinks too much and talks too well and distracts everyone from noticing what Gabriel is actually doing." A beat. "It's not inaccurate. It's just not all I am."

I shift against the pillows, pulling the phone closer to my ear. The weight of what he's saying isn't in the words—it's in the weariness underneath them. The youngest brother, deployed as social camouflage. The charming one. The performance that everyone, including his own family, has mistaken for the person.

"What are you?" I ask. Quietly. Not as a therapist—not with clinical distance or professional framing. As a woman lying in the dark, asking a man a question, she actually wants the answer to.

The silence stretches. I can hear the space around him—the faint echo that comes from high ceilings, stone walls, the acoustic signature of a building built to amplify the human voice toward God. His church. His silence sounds different from mine. Mine is small and warm and muffled by blankets and closed windows. His is vast and cold and has edges.

"I don't know," he says. "I've been performing so long, I'm not sure there's anything underneath it. Or if there is, I'm not sure I'd recognize it."

"There is," I say.

"How do you know?"

"Because the performance doesn't call me at nine o'clock on a Thursday night. Whatever's underneath it does."

Another silence. Longer. I don't fill it. The therapist in me knows that silence after a statement like that is where the real response lives—in the pause, in the breath, in the space a person takes before they decide whether to step forward or retreat.

He steps forward.

"I used to hide in the library," he says. "When I was a kid. The manor has—you'll see it Saturday. This enormous library, floor to ceiling, two stories, one of those rolling ladders. Gabriel used it as a command center even then—twelve years old, sitting behind the desk like he owned it, which I suppose he did. And Josiah used it to disappear into books because Josiah processes the world through text. I processed it through my hands."

"Through your hands."

"I've always understood things by touching them. Taking them apart. Feeling the weight and the edges before I trust my understanding." A breath. "There was a gap behind the leather sofa. Two feet, maybe. I'd crawl in there with a flashlight and a pocketknife and whatever I'd stolen from the house—a clock, a music box, one of the locks from the garden shed. I'd take them apart, piece by piece, and put them back together. I could disappear for hours. Nobody could find me. Gabriel would send people looking and they'd search the whole house and I'd be six feet from the desk he was sitting at, invisible."

I close my eyes. The image—a small boy wedged behind a leather sofa in a vast library, disassembling a clock by flashlight while his eldest brother conducted operations ten feet away. Hiding in plain sight. Learning how things worked by breaking them down to their smallest components. A skill he apparently applied to everything—mechanisms, people, women in dark apartments who answer the phone when they shouldn't.

"What happened to the things you took apart?"

"I put them back. Always. Better than they were—I'd clean the gears, oil the hinges, fix the things that had been broken before I got to them. Nobody ever knew I'd touched them. That was the point. Understanding something without anyone knowing you'd been inside it."

The words settle into the dark of my apartment like stones dropped into still water. Ripples spreading. Because I know what his hands feel like. On my throat, on my hips, on the inside of my thighs. The way he touches me—thorough, deliberate, cataloging—I thought it was dominance. Control. And it is, partly. But it's also this. The way he learns. The way he makes the world real to himself. His hands aren't just taking. They're reading.

"Is that why you use knives?" I ask.