Page 99 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"Had she?"

"She'd made peace with the money. Not the silence." He examines his hands. "She died when I was twenty-five. Heart failure. Forty-nine years old. Dominic didn't come to the funeral. Didn't send flowers. Sent a check."

"And Isabelle?" I ask. "His wife."

Something complicated moves behind the glass of his eyes.

"Isabelle found out about the affair when I was still small. Maybe a receipt, maybe a private investigator, maybe she just knew the way wives know. And then she found out about me—the proof that it wasn't just a mistake, that it had produced something permanent. It broke her. Not all at once. Slowly. She just... receded. Dominic told me this later, the one time he let me into his house. Said my existence hadaccelerated her decline.Like she was an investment that underperformed. Like it was my fault his wife couldn't survive the knowledge of what he'd done."

"She died."

"She died. Years later. By then, she was barely there—Ezra was already running the family, holding things together while Dominic played patriarch and Isabelle disappeared into whatever quiet place she'd found to put the pain. Dominic blamed me. Not the affair. Not himself. Me. The proof that wouldn't stay buried."

Lucy is watching him. I can feel her clinical attention shifting from assessment to something deeper. She's hearing the wound underneath the recitation. She can't help it.

"I tried to reach him when I was nineteen," Caspian says. "A handwritten letter. He sent a paralegal from Whitfield & Parrish—a twenty-six-year-old in a gray suit who sat across from me in a coffee shop and explained, very politely, that Mr. St. Croix had no interest in personal contact, that the terms of the trust were non-negotiable, and that any attempt to publicize the relationship would result in the termination of all support. He handed me a confidentiality reaffirmation to sign. I signed it because I was nineteen and didn't know what else to do."

The crack in his voice is real. Brief, but real.

"A year later, Dominic called me. The only time he ever called me directly—not through the lawyers, not through the trust. He told me a man named Edward Ambrose had traced the payments, found out about me, and was going to bring it before the Brotherhood council. Force Dominic to acknowledge me publicly or face the consequences."

This is it. The gap in the wall. The answer I've been chasing for twelve years.

"Your father, Benedict. Methodical. You come by it honestly. He traced the payments the same way you did—the shells, the trust, the firm. And unlike the rest of the council, who knew about Dominic'sprivate obligationand chose to look away, your father decided it was a threat. A hidden son of a founding family, carrying a grudge—he saw the instability. He confronted Dominic. October fourteenth."

The date. Pinned to my wall for twelve years.

"Dominic told him everything. Begged him—the great Dominic St. Croix, begging Edward Ambrose to keep quiet. Your father refused. Said he'd bring it before the council."

"So you killed him."

"Dominic called me. Told me Edward was going to destroy the arrangement—the payments, the trust, everything. And he said—" Caspian's voice shifts, a different register, quoting from memory—"I trust you'll handle this appropriately.Which is how a man like Dominic sayskill someonewithout using the word."

"And you did it."

"Aconitine. Wolfsbane extract. Induces cardiac arrhythmia—presents as a heart attack. Nearly undetectable unless you screen for it specifically, and no one does when a sixty-one-year-old drops dead at a Brotherhood function. His scotch. He was gone before the ambulance arrived."

Twelve years. The wall and the question and the solitude. And the answer is this: my father was poisoned by a man who didn't exist, at the request of a man who refused to acknowledge that man's existence. My father's scotch. At a Brotherhood event. Surrounded by the people who were supposed to protect him.

"I was twenty-two," Caspian says. "Twenty-two years old. I killed a man I'd never met because my father asked me to—the father who wouldn't look at me, wouldn't say my name, wouldn't let me into his house. And I thought it would change something. That he'd see what I was willing to do. That it would matter."

The room is very quiet.

"It didn't matter. The payments continued. The silence continued. Three more years of nothing. So I tried one last time—went to the house at twenty-five. Showed up at the gate and told the guard I was there to see my father. They let me in." He leans forward. The light catches his face, and the resemblance sharpens—the jaw, the mouth. "He looked at me for about ten seconds. Then he told me the payments would continue, theacknowledgment never would. Told me about Isabelle—what my existence had done to her. Told me to leave and not come back."

The crack seals. The pleasant voice returns.

"I'd killed a man for him. And he looked at me for ten seconds and told me to leave."

A pause. Something shifts in his face.

"Four years later, the cancer came. Pancreatic. Stage three—treatable, with the right protocol. Survivable, even. Fifteen percent five-year survival with aggressive treatment, and Dominic had access to the best oncologists in the country." He examines his fingernails. "But the toxicology on a cancer patient is complicated. So many drugs already in the system. Chemotherapy, anti-nausea, painkillers. If something were introduced—something that interacted with the existing cocktail, accelerated organ failure in a way that looked like disease progression—who would question it? Cancer kills people. Sometimes faster than expected."

Lucy's breath catches. Small. Involuntary.

"Call it rage," Caspian says. "He was dying anyway. I just made sure he died knowing his son—hisactual son—was the one holding the needle."

"Ezra doesn't know."