Page 66 of Dark Billionaire Predator

I am walking into the Ambrose world with my eyes open. No one made me. No one tricked me. No one swept me off my feet or broke down my defenses or overwhelmed my judgment. I am a twenty-five-year-old woman with a doctorate and a practice and a full understanding of exactly what I'm doing, and I am choosing to do it.

My phone buzzes. One last time.

Benedict:Tomorrow.

I pick it up. Hold it in the dark. Type back:Tomorrow.

Then I plug the phone in and lie down and close my eyes and don't sleep for a very long time.

Chapter 22 - Benedict

Saturday. The manor.

I arrive at five—two hours before dinner, early enough to walk the house alone before Gabriel fills it with people and purpose. The drive from Gowanus takes forty minutes on a Saturday, the BQE uncharacteristically forgiving, and I spend the drive doing the thing I always do before I come here: assembling the mask. Piece by piece. The smile, the ease, the looseness in my shoulders that suggests a man with nothing to hide and nothing to carry. The charming brother. The one they all relax around.

The gates open automatically—Gabriel had the old iron ones replaced with something electronic after Iris was born, sensors and cameras and the quiet hum of a security system designed by people who understand that the most dangerous threats arrive in familiar shapes. I park behind Gabriel's black sedan and Josiah's SUV and sit in the car for a moment, looking at the house.

The Ambrose manor. Three stories of Georgian stone and ivy, the kind of house that appears in architectural magazines and shelter blogs without anyone ever mentioning what happens inside it. From the outside, it's beautiful—symmetrical, classical, the proportions of an era that believed in order. Old trees frame the drive. The gardens, dormant now in February, will be immaculate again in spring—Poppy's influence, the florist's touch bringing life to a house that has always felt, to me, like a very elegant mausoleum.

I grew up here. Learned to walk in the front hallway, learned to read in the library, learned to fight in the basement gymnasium that my father built when Gabriel was twelve. Iknow every room, every corridor, every creaking floorboard and drafty window. I know where the servants' stairs connect the kitchen to the second floor. I know which closet door doesn't latch properly, which bathroom has a window that opens onto the garden roof, which section of the basement wall sounds hollow when you knock on it because there's a room behind it that doesn't appear on any blueprint.

I know this house the way I know my own body—completely, intimately, with a familiarity that has curdled over the years from comfort into something more complicated. This house made me. I am made of its hallways and its shadows and the particular quality of silence that accumulates in rooms where powerful men have made decisions that destroyed other people's lives.

I get out of the car. The February air is sharp, clean, carrying the faint smell of wood smoke from somewhere—Poppy must have lit the fireplaces. She does that when she's cooking for a gathering, fills the house with warmth and light and the smells of food, and for the hours that the dinner lasts, the manor almost feels like a home instead of a headquarters.

Almost.

The front door is unlocked. I step into the hallway—marble floors, the curved staircase rising to the second floor, the chandelier that my mother chose thirty years ago and that Gabriel has never replaced despite Poppy's gentle suggestions. Crystal and brass. Margaret Ambrose's taste, preserved in light.

I stop at the base of the stairs. Look up. My father's portrait hangs on the landing—oil on canvas, commissioned when Edward was forty-five, the painter capturing the exact expression that I remember from childhood: composed,authoritative, opaque. A face designed to project certainty. A face that gave away nothing.

I look at that face every time I come here. I've been looking at it for over a decade, searching for something in the painted eyes—a clue, a confession, a sign that the man who raised me was aware of his own mortality, his own fragility, the possibility that someone in his orbit might one day decide he needed to die.

The painting gives me nothing. It never does. Edward Ambrose was not a man who left clues.

He was not a warm man. I understood that early—earlier than Josiah, who processed the absence intellectually, and much earlier than Gabriel, who replaced the absence with emulation and became Edward so thoroughly that sometimes I look at my eldest brother and see my father's ghost wearing a younger man's face. I understood it the way a child understands cold: not as a concept, but as a sensation. The chill that entered a room when Edward entered it. The distance in his eyes when he looked at his sons—not dislike, not indifference, but something more precise. Assessment. He was always assessing us. Measuring what we were against what he needed us to become.

Gabriel became what Edward needed. Josiah bent himself into the shape Edward required. I—I refused. Not loudly, not dramatically. I simply slid behind the couch in the library and took apart his clocks and put them back together better than I found them and waited for someone to notice.

Nobody noticed. That was the lesson. In the Ambrose family, you were useful, or you were invisible, and the invisible son learned to make himself useful in ways nobody expected.

I turn from the portrait. Walk down the hallway toward the library.

Gabriel is in the library. Of course he is—this is his natural habitat, the room he inherited the way a king inherits a throne room. Edward's desk, Edward's chair, Edward's shelves lined with books that serve more as decoration than literature. Gabriel has added his own touches over the years—a laptop, a phone system, the framed photograph of Poppy and Iris that sits on the corner of the desk like a declaration of intent.I am not only what my father was. I am also this.

"You're early," Gabriel says without looking up.

"You told me to be present. I'm being present."

He looks up. Studies me with the focused attention that has made powerful men flinch for as long as I can remember. Gabriel's gaze is a weapon—not the obvious kind, not aggressive, but penetrating in a way that strips pretense like paint thinner. He doesn't see what you show him. He sees what you're hiding.

I've been hiding from Gabriel my entire life. So far, I've been good enough.

"Cates will be here at seven," he says. "He'll sit to your left. Make him comfortable. Get him talking about his clients—specifically the family portfolios. I want to know what the St. Croix assets look like since Dominic's death."

"What specifically about their assets?"

"Ezra has been consolidating since Dominic died. Aggressively. I want to know what that consolidation looks like from inside their financial architecture."