Page 98 of Dark Billionaire Predator

The address is an hour north on the Taconic. I know it—one of the shell entities in the Hargrove Holdings chain owns a property there. Found it weeks ago in the payment records. A house purchased twenty-three years ago through three layers of corporate shielding, taxes paid automatically, no rental history. The kind of property that exists to give someone a place without giving them a name.

I drive. The Taconic is empty at this hour—two lanes cutting through dark woods, the headlights pulling the road into existence twenty feet at a time. My hands are steady on the wheel. The Benchmade is in my coat.

I should call Gabriel. Should call Josiah. The resources of a family that runs a criminal organization, men at that house within the hour.

I don't call anyone. This is mine. Twelve years of the wall and the church and the solitude. My father's death. My investigation. And now Lucy, taken by someone who knew exactly which thread to pull to bring me running.

The house appears at the end of a private road, a mile off the highway. Set back in trees—a colonial, white clapboard, well-maintained. The kind of house that looks ordinary from the outside, the architectural equivalent of a cover story. Lights on in the ground-floor windows. A car in the driveway.

He's not hiding. He's waiting.

I park at the end of the road and walk in through the tree line. The ground is frozen hard enough to move quietly. I circle the house once. Two exits—front door, back door through the kitchen. I can see inside through the curtained windows.

He's sitting in an armchair in the living room. The room is furnished—simply, carefully, the belongings of a man who lives here. Books on shelves. A kitchen visible through an archway, dishes in the drying rack. This isn't a safe house. This is a home. The home that was bought with the money meant to make someone invisible.

And Lucy. On a sofa across from him, hands bound in front of her with zip ties. Not gagged—he wants her to be able to talk. She's watching him with an expression I recognize from her clinical work—the focused assessment of someone cataloging behavior, building a profile, looking for leverage. She's terrified. But she's working.

I go in through the back door. The lock is a Schlage—decent, not serious. Eight seconds. The kitchen is dark, the hallway beyond it lit from the living room. I move through the house the way I move through every space that might contain a threat—controlled, silent, mapping exits and angles.

The hallway opens to the living room. Lucy sees me over his shoulder. Her eyes widen—a fraction, controlled, the flinch suppressed. She doesn't call out. Just holds my gaze for half a second and then looks back at him.

"You can come in, Benedict." His voice is calm. Pleasant. Rehearsed. "The kitchen door was unlocked on purpose."

I step into the living room. The knife is in my hand—along my forearm, blade flat against the inside of my coat sleeve.

"Sit," he says, gesturing at a dining chair positioned across from his armchair. "Please."

"You tied up a woman to get me here. I'll stand."

"She's fine. Tell him you're fine, Lucy."

"I'm fine." Her clinical voice—the one she uses with patients in crisis.I am in control of myself even if I am not in control of the situation."He hasn't hurt me."

"I haven't hurt her," the man confirms. "She's not the one I've been watching."

I stay standing. Six feet from him.

"You've been asking about my family," he says. "For months. Harlan Cates. Ruth Calloway. Bryan Vanderwal. Even my brother Gideon, up in Portland."

"Your family." But I already know. The two words on my wall. The shape I've been tracing for twelve years. I knowwhathe is. I just didn't have his face until now.

"The St. Croixs." He smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes—nothing reaches his eyes. "I know you've been calling me SC-6. On your wall, in your head. So let me give you what you're missing. My name is Caspian. Not Caspian St. Croix—I was never given that. Just Caspian. The way you'd name a dog or a project or a problem you intend to manage from a distance."

I watch him. The jawline. The set of the mouth. Ezra has it too, though Ezra's version is polished by privilege. Caspian's is rougher. The same blueprint shaped by different hands.

"I know what you are," I say. "I worked it out."

Surprise—genuine, brief. He expected to be delivering revelations.

"Then you're further along than I thought." He recalibrates—I can see it happen behind his eyes. "But you knowwhatI am. You don't know what I've done."

He's right. I know the architecture. I don't know what it produced. I don't know why my father is dead.

"Dominic St. Croix was my father," he says. "He had an affair with a woman named Marie Hollis in 1991, and nine months later, I arrived, and he spent the next three decades making sure no one would ever know. Monthly payments through shell companies. A sealed trust. A law firm in New Haven. You've traced all of that. But the machinery doesn't tell you what it feels like to be the thing the machinery was built to hide." He tilts his head. "SC-6. You've been staring at that on your wall, haven't you? St. Croix, sixth child. Dominic had five with Isabelle—Ezra, Malachi, Gideon, Seraphina, Lazarus. I'm the one they didn't count. The sixth. Filed under a code instead of a name."

He's not reciting facts for me anymore. He's telling me the story. And I let him, because every word fills gaps I couldn't fill from records and payment trails, and because Lucy is six feet away with zip ties on her wrists and I need him focused on his performance, not on her.

"My mother told me when I was sixteen. Sat me down and explained why we lived the way we lived—the apartment we couldn't quite afford, the schools slightly too good for a single mother's salary, the monthly envelope without a return address. She told me my father was a wealthy man with a family and nointention of claiming me. She said it like she'd made peace with it."