Chapter 4 - Benedict #2
"If you need help," he says finally. "With whatever this is. You know where to find me."
"I know."
"And if whatever this is puts the family at risk—"
"You'll be the first to know."
He nods. Accepts it. But his eyes say he's filing this conversation away, adding it to the running ledger he keeps on everyone in his orbit. Gabriel doesn't forget. He just waits.
I leave the manor with the taste of evasion in my mouth and drive back to Gowanus.
***
The afternoon is for Gideon.
The third St. Croix brother. The exile. He left the family seven years ago—walked away from the name, the money, the Brotherhood legacy. Nobody talks about why. In Brotherhood circles, leaving is treated as a kind of death—you're mourned once and never mentioned again.
But Gideon didn't just leave. He disappeared.
Changed his name, relocated, built a new life so thoroughly that finding him has taken me the better part of a week.
In Brotherhood families, departure is the ultimate betrayal—worse than incompetence, worse than disloyalty.
Ezra would have treated it as a death. Would have erased Gideon from the family narrative the way you'd cut a tumor from healthy tissue—cleanly, completely, without sentiment.
Which makes me wonder what Gideon knew that made cutting ties worth the price.
The break came yesterday, from a source I trust—a former Brotherhood accountant who handles identity work on the side. Gideon St. Croix is now Gideon Marsh. He lives in Portland, Maine. Teaches high school English at a public school near the waterfront.
A St. Croix teaching high school. The irony is so thick I can taste it. His father managed billions. His brother Ezra runs a financial empire. And Gideon is grading papers on To Kill a Mockingbird in a coastal town four hours from New York.
People don't walk away from families like the St. Croix without a reason. They don't change their names and teach high school unless something pushed them out—something they saw, or knew, or couldn't live with.
I need to talk to him. But approaching an exile is delicate. He left for a reason, and that reason almost certainly involves not wanting to be found by people like me. If I show up unannounced, he'll either run or shut down. Either way, I get nothing.
So I need a pretext. Something that gets me in the door without triggering every alarm he's built into his new life.
I think about this while the afternoon light moves through the stained glass, painting the nave in shifting colors. Blue, then gold, then that deep arterial red that always makes me think of things I shouldn't.
A pretext. Something truthful enough to hold up under scrutiny but vague enough to keep my real purpose hidden.
Then I have it. The Meridian Foundation—the St. Croix family's philanthropic arm, now run by Seraphina.
It funds arts and education programs throughout New England.
A man running an education-adjacent charity reaching out to a high school teacher in Maine about a potential grant opportunity—that's normal.
That's expected. That's a door that opens without force.
I start building the cover. A shell email, a convincing letterhead, the outline of a program that would give me a reason to visit Portland and sit across from Gideon Marsh for an hour.
It'll take a few days to set up properly. I need it to be clean—nothing that traces back to the Ambrose name. If Ezra finds out I'm looking for his exiled brother, the questions he'll ask will be the kind I can't afford to answer yet.
I work until the light fades and the church goes dark around me. The canal water catches the last of the sunset through the windows—a smear of orange across the stone floor, there and gone.
Two threads now. Two directions.
South, to Portland and Gideon Marsh and whatever secret drove a St. Croix to abandon his name. That trip is days away—planning, preparation, the careful construction of a lie that needs to be perfect.
And west, to Greenwich Village. To West 10th Street. To the woman who looked at me in the dark last night and saw something that made her check her lock a third time.
I scared her. I know I did. The crisis center slip—careless, stupid, the kind of mistake I don't make on Brotherhood operations because Brotherhood operations don't rewire my brain the way Lucy Anderson does.
She noticed. She filed it. And now she's sitting in her apartment with a question she can't answer and an unease she can't name, and the smart thing—the decent thing—would be to back off.
Let the encounter fade. Let her convince herself it was nothing.
But I've never been the decent brother. That's Gabriel. I've never been the cautious one. That's Josiah.
I'm the one who burns.
And the thing about burning is that it doesn't stop because you know it should.
It doesn't stop because the woman you're burning for looked at you with fear behind her eyes.
It doesn't stop because you stood on her block in the dark like the predator you are and watched her window until the light went off.
It just burns hotter.
I close the laptop, climb the stairs to the choir loft, and lie in the dark thinking about two hunts that are starting to feel like one—the dead father I'm trying to avenge and the living woman I'm trying to deserve.
Neither one is going to end well. I know that with the bone-deep certainty of a man who's spent his whole life watching things he wants turn to ash.
But I've never let that stop me before.