Page 77 of Dark Billionaire Predator

I drink the wine. Look at her face in the kitchen light. Think about SC-6 and Ruth Calloway's warning and the person at the end of the trail who may not want to be found.

Then I stop thinking about it. I set the glass down and pull her toward me and press my mouth against her throat—the place where the first bruise used to be, the skin smooth now, unmarked, ready—and she tips her head back and makes the sound that I will never get tired of hearing, the small exhalation that meansyes, here, now,and the investigation goes back into the compartment and the lid closes and there is nothing in the world except this woman in this kitchen in this warm apartment with the door she left unlocked for me.

Chapter 25 - Lucy

Tuesday. The scarf comes off.

I decide in the bathroom mirror at seven fifteen, examining my throat in the overhead light. The bruise is gone—not fading, not yellow-green at the edges, not almost invisible. Gone. The skin is smooth, unmarked, the same throat I had three weeks ago before a man's mouth changed the geography of my body.

I untie the silk. Fold it. Put it in the drawer.

The gesture feels larger than it should. I've been wearing the scarf for over a week—not because the bruise required it for most of that time, but because the ritual required it. The silk against my throat, the careful knot, the tether between the woman who works and the woman who is worked on. The scarf was a border crossing. I tied it each morning and became the professional, the therapist, the composed woman in the chair. I untied it each evening and became—the other one.

Without it, the two women are just me. Standing in my bathroom with an unmarked throat and a bruise on my inner thigh that is darkening nicely under my trousers and no visible border between the life I live in public and the life I live in the dark.

I go to work.

My ten o'clock cancels. My eleven o'clock—a grad student working through perfectionism and the anxiety it feeds—cries for thirty minutes about a paper she can't finish because every sentence feels like proof of her inadequacy. I sit with her crying. Hold the space. Say the things that are true: that perfectionism is a defense against the fear of being seen, that the paper doesn't need to be perfect, that the terror of producing somethingimperfect is actually the terror of being human and therefore flawed and therefore unworthy of love.

I believe what I'm saying. I always believe what I'm saying. That's never been the problem.

The problem is the bruise on my thigh that pulses when I shift in my chair, and the man who put it there, and the fact that I am sitting in this office dispensing wisdom about the fear of being seen while simultaneously hiding the biggest secret of my life from every person who knows me.

Between clients, I eat a sandwich at my desk and check my phone. Benedict:How's your day?

The question is ordinary. Three words, unremarkable, the kind of text that millions of people send each other every day. But Benedict doesn't do ordinary. His texts have been commands, provocations, the precisely calibrated language of a man who uses words the way he uses knives—with intention, with aim.How's your dayis new. It's the text of a man who woke up in my bed yesterday morning and drank coffee from my cup and is now, apparently, checking in.

Busy. You?

Thinking.

About?

Your kitchen. The way you hand me coffee like it's something you've always done.

I stare at the screen. Read it twice. The clinical voice—quieter now, these days, but still there—notes:emotional disclosure, acknowledgment of domestic intimacy, possible escalation from physical attachment to emotional dependency.The rest of me notes: he's thinking about my kitchen. About coffee. About the way I handed him a cup without ceremony orself-consciousness, because it was morning and he was there, and that's what you do when someone is in your kitchen in the morning.

It's just coffee,I type.

Nothing with you is just anything.

I put the phone down. Press my fingers against the bruise under my trousers. Feel the four points and breathe.

***

Tuesday evening. The crisis center.

I've been volunteering here for three years—every Tuesday, six to ten, a walk-in center in the East Village that serves anyone who needs someone to talk to. No appointments. No intake forms. No insurance. Just a room with chairs and a coffee machine, and people like me who sit in those chairs and listen to whoever walks through the door.

This is where I'm most myself. Not the private practice version—the polished professional with the framed diploma and the carefully curated office. Here I'm stripped down. No desk between me and the person across from me. No fifty-minute hour. No notes. Just presence. The raw material of what I do before it gets dressed up in clinical language and billing codes.

The center is in the basement of a church—not Benedict's church, a different one, a functioning one, with a congregation and a minister and a sign on the door that says ALL ARE WELCOME in three languages. The irony of spending my Tuesday evenings in a church basement while spending my other evenings with a man who lives in one is not lost on me.

Tonight is quiet. A teenager who fought with her mother and needs somewhere to sit that isn't home. An older man whocomes every few weeks to talk about his wife who died—not in crisis, just lonely, just wanting a human voice to fill the space where hers used to be. I sit with each of them. Listen. Hold the space. Do the work that keeps me tethered to the person I was before Benedict Ambrose appeared in my life and rearranged it.

At eight thirty, a woman walks in.

She's my age, maybe a year or two older. Well-dressed—not wealthy, but careful. The kind of woman who takes time with her appearance because it's a form of control, because looking put-together is a way of convincing yourself and the world that you are put-together. I recognize the strategy because I use it myself.