Page 89 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"Gabriel asks me everything. I'm his early warning system. Always have been." He straightens. Adjusts his cuffs. "I told him you're fine. Don't make me a liar."

He walks away. Down the stairs, back into the main room, absorbed into the crowd with the seamless efficiency of a man who has spent his career being exactly where he needs to be and nowhere else.

I stand on the landing and feel the weight of his warning—not the words but the calculation behind them. Josiah has mapped the blast radius. Lucy. Ava. Gabriel. The Brotherhood. The St. Croix family. Every thread I'm pulling is connected to other threads, and pulling one vibrates them all, and Josiah—who understands systems the way I understand mechanisms—is telling me that the system is under strain.

I find Bryan Vanderwal's proxy on the first floor—his grandnephew, a man in his forties named Louis, who manages Bryan's affairs and serves as his eyes and ears at events the old man can no longer attend. Louis is drunk—three bourbons past useful, the mask hanging from his neck by its ribbon, the discretion that Bryan would have demanded already dissolved by alcohol.

I buy him a fourth.

"How's Bryan?" I ask.

"Dying, I think. Slowly. He won't admit it, but the doctors have stopped being optimistic." Louis drinks. "He talks about you, you know. Asks about you. Asks if you've been—pursuing certain interests."

"What interests?"

"He didn't specify. He just said—tell Benedict that Dominic had private obligations. Costly ones. The council wasaware and chose to look the other way because the alternative—Dominic's business becoming everyone's business—was worse for the organization."

Private obligations. Costly. The council looked the other way. The words file themselves alongside the monthly payments, the law firm, the SC-6 code I glimpsed on Ruth Calloway's filing cabinet. Dominic was maintaining something—or someone—expensive and secret, and the Brotherhood leadership knew about it and chose silence over scrutiny.

Which means my father knew. Edward was on the council. Edward was Dominic's closest ally. Whatever these private obligations were, my father was one of the men who decided to tolerate them.

The question is whether he decided to stop tolerating them. And whether that decision got him killed.

Louis is still talking—about Bryan's health, about a property dispute, about the cost of nurses. I let him talk. The information I needed has already been delivered, and the deliveryman doesn't know what he carried.

***

I leave the Covenant at midnight. The mask comes off in the car—I pull it free and set it on the passenger seat and breathe the cold air through the cracked window. The mask leaves a faint impression on my skin—the pressure lines of concealment, the physical evidence of hours spent hiding in plain sight.

I drive south. Not to Gowanus. Not to the church and the wall and the narrow bed and the cold silence that used to be all I needed.

To West 10th Street. To Lucy.

The deadbolts turn. The door opens. The apartment is dark—she's asleep, the weighted blanket pulled up, the radiator clicking its rhythm. I undress in the dark. Get into bed. She stirs. Rolls toward me. Her hand finds my chest—the palm against my sternum, the unconscious reach that has become the way she greets me in the dark.

"Late," she murmurs. Half-asleep.

"Brotherhood thing."

"Mmm." She presses closer. Her body warm against mine, her hair against my jaw, her breathing already slowing back toward sleep. She doesn't ask what kind of thing. Just absorbs my presence the way the apartment absorbs my presence—naturally, without resistance, as if the space was always meant for two.

I lie in the dark and hold her and think about masks and fathers and Dominic St. Croix's private obligations.

Private. Costly. Tolerated by the council because the alternative was worse.

What was Dominic maintaining? What was my father protecting—or threatening to expose? What lives at the end of the monthly payments and the law firm and the file coded SC-6?

The questions are there. The answers are close—I can feel them the way you feel a wall thinning before your fist goes through it. A few more pieces. A few more threads.

But tonight, the thread that holds me is the one wrapped around my chest—Lucy's arm, her breathing, her warmth. The investigation will be there in the morning. The wall will wait.

I close my eyes. Press my mouth against Lucy's hair. And fall asleep in a bed that isn't mine, in a life that isn't mine, in thearms of a woman who is becoming mine in ways that neither of us planned and neither of us can stop.

Chapter 29 - Lucy

It happens on a Wednesday. Not because Wednesday is significant—not because something triggers it, not because Benedict does anything wrong or different or new. It happens on a Wednesday because that's when the weight of all the individual pieces I've been carrying finally assembles itself into a shape I can see, and the shape is me, and I don't recognize her.

I'm standing in my kitchen. Seven in the morning. He left an hour ago—early, before my alarm, the quiet exit that has become his routine. The deadbolts turning behind him, the sound of a man locking a woman in from the outside because the locks that were supposed to keep him out now keep her safe. He made coffee before he left. Two cups—one for him, already washed, sitting on the drying rack. One for me, still warm on the counter.