Page 7 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"Be careful with the St. Croix name," Vanderwal warned. "There are sons. They won't appreciate an Ambrose asking questions about their father."

"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.

"Because I'm ninety-three, boy. And because someone should know."

I've since learned there are four sons, plus a sister. Ezra, the eldest—cold, controlled, the one who took over after Dominic's death. Malachi, the enforcer. Gideon, who left the family years ago and lives under a different name. Seraphina, who runs their legitimate business front. And Lazarus, the youngest, about whom no one seems to know anything at all.

The paper has a name and a date. Dominic St. Croix. Three weeks before my father died.

I open my laptop. Start searching.

***

The evening finds me in Bushwick, and there's blood on my hands.

It happened fast. It always happens fast.

I was driving back from a meeting—Brotherhood business, the legitimate kind. Cutting through side streets to avoid the BQE. A man. A woman. The mouth of an alley. His hand on her throat, her back against the wall, her feet barely touching the ground. She was making sounds—not screaming, because she couldn't, but small choked sounds of terror that carried through my open window like a signal flare.

I could have called the police.

Instead, I parked the car. Got out. Walked into the alley.

The knife was in my hand before I'd consciously decided to draw it. One step, two, and then I was behind him, and the blade was finding the space between his ribs with the ease of long practice. He made a sound—surprise, mostly, then pain, then nothing.

He dropped the woman and staggered sideways, his hands going to the wound, his eyes finding mine for the first time. I don't know what he saw in my face. Whatever it was, it was the last thing he ever saw.

He fell. The woman ran. I let her go—she'd seen a man in a dark coat in a dark alley on a dark night. She wouldn't be able to describe me if she tried, and she probably wouldn't try. People who've just been saved from the worst moment of their lives don't go to the police to report their rescuer.

I stood over the body for thirty seconds. Maybe forty. Long enough for my heart rate to come down, for the red to clear from my vision, for the world to settle back into its normal configuration. The sounds of the city returned in layers—traffic, a distant siren, music from a bar two blocks over, the ordinary noise of a Tuesday night in Brooklyn carrying on as if nothing had changed.

Then I cleaned the knife, moved the body behind the dumpster, got in my car, and drove away.

***

The church again. The chair. The mosaic. Christ's chipped eyes watching me from across the centuries.

My hands are clean now. Scrubbed in the sacristy sink, the water running pink then clear.

Here's the thing no one knows about me. Not Gabriel, not Josiah, not anyone. When the red comes, and I act on it—when the knife finds flesh and the life leaves—the noise in my head stops. The restlessness, the crawling sensation of being trapped inside my own skin, the constant low-grade hum of somethingwrongthat I've been carrying since I was nineteen—it all goes silent. For thirty seconds, maybe a minute, the world is perfectly still. Perfectly clear. Like the moment after a thunderstorm, when the air is washed clean, and everything smells like rain.

And then it comes back. It always comes back. Usually worse than before, because now there's a body to account for, another weight on a conscience that's already staggering.

But for that one minute of silence—God, it's worth it.

I'm not a serial killer. I need to be clear about that, even if only to myself. I don't hunt. Don't plan. Don't select victims according to some twisted internal logic. I'm not Josiah, who kept forty-five trophies in a hidden room. I'm something else. Something worse, maybe, or something simpler. A man with a hair trigger and a moral code that runs hotter than it should. I see someone doing something unforgivable and the red comes and I act. No deliberation. No calculation about consequences or exposure.

Just the knife, and the silence, and the terrible peace that follows.

Eleven times. Eleven years. Eleven kills the Brotherhood doesn't know about. The man beating his girlfriend outside a bar in the East Village. The dealer selling to a kid who couldn't have been more than thirteen. The landlord who'd been terrorizing his elderly tenants. Eleven bodies that were never connected to me, never investigated, never solved.

Gabriel would be furious if he knew—not about the killing, but about the recklessness. The exposure. The risk I've been taking without his knowledge or consent. He's cleaned up after me before, when my sanctioned kills got messier than they should have—when I moved too fast, acted without waiting for the council's approval. But those were Brotherhood targets. Those he could explain could fold into the organizational framework.

These are mine. Private. Unaccountable to anyone except the cracked mosaic of Christ staring down at me from the apse.

I stand up, rinse the cup, stare at the clean water running into the drain.

Tomorrow, I'm done watching.