Page 97 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"I want to be there. When you find the answer, I want to be in the room."

"Meet me tomorrow. I'll have more by then."

A pause. I could feel him deciding—whether to push, whether to mobilize his own resources, whether to trust an Ambrose with something this close to St. Croix blood.

"Tomorrow," he said. The word sounded like a blade being sheathed. Temporarily. "Don't make me wait, Ambrose."

***

I'm standing at the wall. The two words I wrote two nights ago sit at the center of twelve years of evidence—written at three in the morning, when the pattern finally resolved. I have the shape now. The architecture of what happened to my father and why.

What I don't have is a face.

I should be working the last threads. That's what twelve years have trained me to do—patient, methodical, alone.

Instead, I'm thinking about Lucy.

Not the wall. Not the investigation. Lucy. The way she looked when she saidthis is over—steady, clinical, her therapist's composure holding together something that was breaking underneath. The keys on the counter. The door closing behind me. Six days of silence that I've been calling respect and am only now recognizing as cowardice.

She was right about the pattern. The intermittent reinforcement, the boundary dissolution, the way I occupied her life like a man occupying territory. She was right about all of it, and I handed back her keys and walked away because she was right, and I told myself that was the decent thing to do. That a correct diagnosis meant the only treatment was separation.

But I've been staring at this wall for twelve years—at the evidence of men who chose silence over truth. Who looked away when they should have looked directly at what was in front of them. Who built architectures of distance rather than face the terrifying simplicity of claiming something and meaning it.

I've been doing the same thing. Calling it respect. Calling it decency. Letting her go because letting go was easier than standing in front of a woman and sayingI know you're right about the pattern, and I'm here anyway, and I'll learn to be what you need if you'll show me what that looks like.

I don't know how to be what she needs. I know how to pick locks and throw knives and kill men who deserve killing. None of that is what she needs.

But I know how to show up. And I know that what I was building in that apartment—coffee in the morning, her body against mine, the silence of two people breathing together—wasn't a pattern. It was the only real thing I've had since my mother died.

I put on my coat. It's eleven-forty at night and the drive to Greenwich Village takes twenty-two minutes.

Her street is quiet. February quiet—the stillness of a city block when the cold has driven everyone inside and the only movement is a taxi on Seventh Avenue two blocks east. I park where I always park, the space across from her building with a sightline to the third floor.

The lights are off.

Not unusual at midnight. But something about the darkness is wrong—not the darkness itself, the quality of it. Her bedroom window usually shows the faint blue glow of the charger on her nightstand, a barely visible pulse I've watched from this car more times than I should admit. Tonight the window is black. No glow. No ambient light. Nothing.

Thirty seconds in the car. Thirty seconds of the operational awareness that has kept me alive through twelve kills, telling me something is off. The feeling is specific—not paranoia, not projection. The feeling of a space that should contain a person and doesn't.

I cross the street. The front door of the building is propped open with a folded takeout menu. Wrong. Lucy's building is careful about the front door. The super checks it nightly.

Third floor. Her hallway. The fluorescent tube buzzing overhead. Her blue door at the end, closed. But both deadbolts unlocked—I can tell from the exterior hardware. Lucy doesn't leave her deadbolts unlocked. She checks them twice before bed, tests each bolt with the palm of her hand, turns away, turns back, checks again. Every night. Without exception. I've watched her do it enough times through windows I shouldn't have been looking through to know.

I push the door open. The apartment is dark and cold—the cold of a space where the heat has been off long enough for February to settle into the furniture.

"Lucy."

Nothing.

Her coat is gone. Her bag is gone. But her laptop is open on the kitchen table, screen dark but not closed. A glass of water on the counter, half full. The details of a person who left in the middle of something. Not packing, not planning. Interrupted.

On the table, next to the laptop. A piece of paper. Block letters, neat, deliberate. Not Lucy's handwriting.

An address—Putnam County. And underneath:

Come alone. She's fine. She'll stay fine as long as you come alone.

You've been looking for me, Benedict. I got tired of waiting.