Page 85 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"Where are we going?"

"A place I used to go. Before."

"Before what?"

"Before I stopped going places."

He parks on a side street in the East Village. Leads me half a block to a door I would have walked past—unmarked, set into the wall of a building that looks residential, no sign, noawning, nothing to indicate that behind it is anything other than someone's apartment.

He knocks. A pattern—two, pause, three. The door opens. A woman in her sixties, dark hair streaked with silver, an apron over a black dress. She sees Benedict and her face changes—not the engineered warmth of a hostess recognizing a regular, but something genuine. Surprised. Pleased.

"Benedict." She says his name the way people say the names of people they haven't seen in a long time and are glad to see again. "It's been years."

"Three years. Hello, Marta."

"Three years and you show up with no reservation and a beautiful woman. Some things don't change." She looks at me. Smiles. "Come in. I'll find you a table."

Inside is small—twelve tables, maybe fifteen, the kind of restaurant that doesn't need a sign because the food does the advertising. Candlelight. White tablecloths. The smell of garlic and wine and bread and something roasting that makes my stomach clench with sudden hunger. It's half-full—couples, a family in the corner, a group of women laughing over pasta. Normal people having normal dinners on a Friday night.

Marta seats us in the back corner. A booth—semi-private, angled so that Benedict can see the door. I notice that. He chose this seat, or Marta chose it for him, because she knows he needs to see the door. The operational awareness that never turns off, even here, even now, even on a date with a woman he put cologne on for.

We sit. He picks up the menu. Puts it down. Picks it up again. His hands are doing the thing they do when he's not in control—the restlessness, the fidgeting, the body's admissionthat the man who commands and dominates and moves through the world with lethal precision is, at this moment, nervous.

Benedict Ambrose is nervous.

"You're fidgeting," I say.

"I don't fidget."

"You've picked up that menu twice without reading it."

He sets the menu down. Flat on the table. Puts his hands in his lap like a schoolboy who's been caught. Then looks at me with an expression that is so stripped of performance, so entirely without the mask, that I feel my breath catch.

"I haven't done this in a very long time," he says.

"Done what?"

"Sat across from a woman in a restaurant. Eaten food. Made conversation that isn't strategy or seduction or the extraction of information." He pauses. "Normal things. I haven't done normal things in a very long time."

"What did you do with other women?"

"Took them home. Or took them to hotels. Or didn't take them anywhere—found them and used them and forgot them. I didn't sit with them. I didn't learn their coffee preferences. I didn't—" He stops. Looks at the candle between us, the flame reflected in his eyes. "I didn't want to know them. That's the difference. I wanted their bodies and I didn't want the rest. With you I want the rest and it terrifies me because I don't know what to do with the rest."

The honesty of it. The raw, unperformed, almost painful honesty. This man, who operates in layers of deception—the Brotherhood, the investigation, the charm, the mask—sitting ina restaurant telling me that he doesn't know how to have dinner with a woman he cares about.

"You're doing it now," I say.

"Badly."

"You're here. You put on cologne. You brought me to a place that means something to you. That's not badly. That's brave."

He looks at me. The wordbravelanding the way it landed on the phone Thursday night, when I told him he was brave, and he said I didn't know that. He hears the word differently than most people—not as a compliment but as a claim. A statement about who he is that he isn't sure he can live up to.

"Marta was my mother's friend," he says. "This was my mother's favorite restaurant. She used to bring me here when I was small—just me, not Gabriel, not Josiah. Just the two of us. She'd order the gnocchi and I'd have whatever she was having because I wanted to be like her and she'd laugh and tell me I was her favorite dining companion."

Margaret Ambrose. Dead of a "sudden illness" when Benedict was—what? A teenager. The mother whose death preceded the father's, whose loss left a wound he's never mentioned except in the negative spaces, the silences around her name.

"She sounds wonderful," I say.