Prologue - Benedict #2
I should let her go. Should walk away, get in my own car, drive back to the church.
That's what I call it—the church. Not home, because I've never been able to call any place that.
A deconsecrated Catholic church in Gowanus that I bought six years ago because something about its ruin spoke to me.
Stone walls, vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows that throw colored light across the nave like a fever dream.
I stripped out the pews, built a bedroom in the choir loft, and left the rest cavernous and echoing.
A cathedral of emptiness. A monument to the kind of faith I've never had.
Outside, the canal sits dark and still, carrying its poison to the sea.
I've always found that comforting. At least the water is honest about what it holds.
I should go back there. Sit in the dark beneath the rose window and think about Vanderwal's name, the thread, the investigation that might finally give me answers.
Instead, I memorize her.
The way she looks standing in the doorway of my family's home, framed by the light behind her.
The lavender dress, now slightly wrinkled from hours of sitting and dancing and living.
The dark hair, mussed from the wind that's picked up outside.
The way she wraps her arms around herself against the chill, a self-protective gesture that makes something in my chest ache.
She deserves better than me. Better than what I am, what I've done, what I'm capable of. She deserves a man whose hands are clean, whose past is simple, whose love doesn't come tangled up in blood and secrets and the kind of darkness that swallows everything it touches.
She deserves someone safe.
I am not safe. I have never been safe. I am the most dangerous thing that has ever set its sights on her, and she doesn't know it yet.
She will.
The car arrives. She gets in. The door closes. The taillights disappear down the long driveway, and I stand at the window watching until there's nothing left to see.
Behind me, the manor settles into silence.
Staff clearing tables, extinguishing candles, dismantling the set pieces of my brother's happily ever after.
Josiah and Ava have already gone upstairs.
Gabriel and Poppy retreated an hour ago, Iris asleep against Gabriel's shoulder.
The house belongs to the ghosts now—and to me, the brother who's always been most comfortable among them.
I sit in the darkened library, surrounded by books I've read and secrets I haven't told.
My father's portrait hangs above the mantle—Edward Ambrose, painted in oils, looking down at me with an expression that might be pride or might be disappointment.
Hard to tell with a dead man. Hard to tell with him, even when he was alive.
Someone killed you. I've believed it for eleven years, and now Vanderwal has given me a reason to think I might finally prove it.
But not tonight. Tonight belongs to something else.
I pull out my phone. Open a browser. Type her name into the search bar with fingers that are steadier now, purposeful.
Lucy Anderson. Licensed clinical psychologist. Private practice in Greenwich Village, specializing in trauma and attachment disorders.
Columbia University, graduated summa cum laude.
Published three papers on complex PTSD in the Journal of Traumatic Stress.
Volunteers at a crisis center on Tuesday evenings.
Lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment on West 10th Street.
The information flows in, and I drink it like water. Every detail, every data point, every piece of the puzzle that is this woman who looked at me across a crowded room and made me feel, for one electric moment, like I was worth looking at.
It's not enough. It's nowhere near enough.
I want more. I want everything. I want to know what she eats for breakfast, what she reads before bed, and what she looks like at three in the morning when the world is quiet and she's the only person awake.
I want to know her habits, her routines, her fears.
The sound of her voice when she's angry.
The shape of her mouth when she's sad. The way she breathes when she sleeps.
I want to know everything about Lucy Anderson.
And then I want to own it.
The thought should horrify me. Would horrify me if I were capable of that particular emotion anymore.
But horror is a luxury for people who still believe in boundaries, and I stopped believing in those a long time ago.
My brothers fell in love like civilized men—obsessive, yes.
Stalkers, absolutely. But there was a framework to their madness, a structure.
Gabriel calculated. Josiah haunted. They knew what they were doing, even when what they were doing was monstrous.
I don't calculate. I don't haunt. I burn.
And Lucy Anderson has just become the center of the fire.
I close the browser. Set down my phone. Stare at my father's portrait in the dark.
Two obsessions. Two hunts. The truth about who killed Edward Ambrose—a truth I've been chasing in the dark for eleven years, and may now finally have a light for.
And the woman who made me feel alive for the first time since I can remember.
Both dangerous. Both consuming. Both likely to destroy me if I'm not careful.
I'm not careful. I've never been careful. It's the thing my brothers love about me and the thing that terrifies them. Gabriel plans. Josiah controls. Benedict ignites—and the people around him either bask in the warmth or burn.
Tomorrow, I'll start pulling the thread Vanderwal gave me. Follow the name, see where it leads, find out if eleven years of suspicion can finally become eleven years of certainty.
But first—before the old business, before the Brotherhood, before any of it—I'm going to find Lucy Anderson.
Not approach her. Not yet. Just... find her.
Learn her. Map the geography of her life the way I mapped the geography of her face tonight, cataloging every detail, committing it to a memory that refuses to let go.
She looked at me tonight. Just once, just for a moment. But in that moment, I saw something in her eyes that I recognized.
Curiosity. The same dangerous curiosity that makes her good at her job—the need to understand, to unravel, to see what's hiding beneath the surface.
She wants to know what's behind my mask.
Part of me hopes she never finds out.
The rest of me can't wait.
I close my phone, set it face down on the table, and head upstairs.
The hallway is dark, the house silent except for the settling of old wood and the distant sound of wind against the windows.
I pass Josiah's door—closed, quiet, his new wife asleep beside him.
I pass Gabriel's door—the faintest sound of Iris murmuring in her crib, the gentle rhythm of a lullaby Poppy hums without thinking.
My brothers. Settled. Safe. Whole, in ways they never expected to be.
I reach my own room. The guest room, really—I haven't slept here in years, not since I bought the church.
But tonight it felt wrong to leave. Tonight, the manor's ghosts feel closer than usual, and my father's portrait is still watching from the library below, and something about this night feels like a hinge. A before and after.
I lie in the dark and think about Lucy Anderson.
About the converted church waiting for me in Gowanus, its empty nave and colored shadows. About how I've been filling that silence with violence and solitude for six years, and how tonight, for the first time, I can imagine filling it with something else.
Someone else.
I close my eyes.
And I start to plan.