Chapter 2 - Benedict
Two weeks.
That's how long I've been watching her. Fourteen days of mapping the geography of Lucy Anderson's life with the same precision I'd use to plan an operation—except this isn't an operation.
Operations have objectives, exit strategies, clearly defined parameters of success and failure. This has none of those things.
She comes out at seven-fifteen. Same time every day—I've clocked it. Navy coat, bag slung across her body, hair pulled back in a low knot that exposes the line of her neck. She pauses on the stoop to check her phone, frowns at something on the screen, then starts walking.
I watch from across the street. She doesn't see me.
She never sees me. I'm good at this—better than my brothers, though they'd never admit it.
Josiah stalks the way he kills: methodically, with grinding patience.
I stalk the way I do everything else—by hiding in plain sight.
Different car every morning from the Brotherhood's fleet.
Dark coat, good shoes, a face that says I belong here even when I don't belong anywhere.
I know her clients now—the anxious marketing director on Mondays and Thursdays, the divorced man on Tuesdays and Fridays, the teenager with the panicking mother on Wednesday afternoons.
I know when she eats lunch at her desk, when she stands at her third-floor window and stares out at the street with an expression I can't read from this distance but desperately want to understand.
I know she volunteers at a crisis center on Tuesday evenings, that she reads in the wine bar on Fridays, that she checks her phone for texts from Ava with a frequency that suggests she's worried about her sister even now that Ava has a husband and a new last name.
I know she lives alone. That her apartment light goes off around eleven most nights. That she checks her door lock twice before bed—I've watched her shadow move behind the curtains, the same small ritual, consistent and human and ordinary in a way that makes my chest ache.
Fourteen days, and I've built a more complete dossier on this woman than I have on most Brotherhood targets.
I could do this normally. Ask Ava for her number, engineer a meeting through family channels. But normal channels aren't what I want.
What I want is to know her before she knows me. To understand the shape of her life before I step into it and change it forever. Because I will change it. Whatever I touch, I alter. Whatever I want, I consume.
So I watch. And I wait. And I learn.
***
The church is cold when I get back.
It's always cold—stone walls, vaulted ceilings, the fundamental inability of a building designed for spiritual contemplation to retain heat in a Brooklyn winter.
I bought it six years ago from the Archdiocese.
Deconsecrated, abandoned, slowly rotting.
I stripped out the pews, built a bedroom in the choir loft, and a kitchen in the sacristy.
Left the rest alone—the nave, the apse with its cracked mosaic of Christ in glory, the stained glass windows that throw fractured color across the stone floor when the light is right.
A cathedral of emptiness. A monument to the kind of faith I've never had.
Outside, the Gowanus Canal sits dark and still, carrying its poison to the sea.
I make espresso in the sacristy kitchen, carry it to the one chair in the nave—a leather wingback that looks absurd beneath the vaulted ceiling, like a throne in a tomb—and pull out my phone.
Two obsessions. Two hunts. I've been neglecting the second one.
Three days before the wedding, Bryan Vanderwal cornered me after a council meeting. Ninety-three years old, sharp as a razor, the last surviving co-founder of the Brotherhood. He and my father built this organization together.
He pressed a folded paper into my hand. "The St. Croix family," he said. "Dominic St. Croix and your father had history. Bad history. The kind that doesn't stay buried forever."
Another founding dynasty—allied with the Ambroses for generations but always in quiet competition. Dominic St. Croix, dead five years from cancer, had been my father's closest friend and most dangerous rival.
"Be careful with the St. Croix name," Vanderwal warned. "There are sons. They won't appreciate an Ambrose asking questions about their father."
"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.
"Because I'm ninety-three, boy. And because someone should know."
I've since learned there are four sons, plus a sister.
Ezra, the eldest—cold, controlled, the one who took over after Dominic's death.
Malachi, the enforcer. Gideon, who left the family years ago and lives under a different name.
Seraphina, who runs their legitimate business front.
And Lazarus, the youngest, about whom no one seems to know anything at all.
The paper has a name and a date. Dominic St. Croix. Three weeks before my father died.
I open my laptop. Start searching.
***
The evening finds me in Bushwick, and there's blood on my hands.
It happened fast. It always happens fast.
I was driving back from a meeting—Brotherhood business, the legitimate kind.
Cutting through side streets to avoid the BQE.
A man. A woman. The mouth of an alley. His hand on her throat, her back against the wall, her feet barely touching the ground.
She was making sounds—not screaming, because she couldn't, but small choked sounds of terror that carried through my open window like a signal flare.
I could have called the police.
Instead, I parked the car. Got out. Walked into the alley.
The knife was in my hand before I'd consciously decided to draw it. One step, two, and then I was behind him, and the blade was finding the space between his ribs with the ease of long practice. He made a sound—surprise, mostly, then pain, then nothing.
He dropped the woman and staggered sideways, his hands going to the wound, his eyes finding mine for the first time. I don't know what he saw in my face. Whatever it was, it was the last thing he ever saw.
He fell. The woman ran. I let her go—she'd seen a man in a dark coat in a dark alley on a dark night. She wouldn't be able to describe me if she tried, and she probably wouldn't try. People who've just been saved from the worst moment of their lives don't go to the police to report their rescuer.
I stood over the body for thirty seconds.
Maybe forty. Long enough for my heart rate to come down, for the red to clear from my vision, for the world to settle back into its normal configuration.
The sounds of the city returned in layers—traffic, a distant siren, music from a bar two blocks over, the ordinary noise of a Tuesday night in Brooklyn carrying on as if nothing had changed.
Then I cleaned the knife, moved the body behind the dumpster, got in my car, and drove away.
***
The church again. The chair. The mosaic. Christ's chipped eyes watching me from across the centuries.
My hands are clean now. Scrubbed in the sacristy sink, the water running pink then clear.
Here's the thing no one knows about me. Not Gabriel, not Josiah, not anyone.
When the red comes, and I act on it—when the knife finds flesh and the life leaves—the noise in my head stops.
The restlessness, the crawling sensation of being trapped inside my own skin, the constant low-grade hum of something wrong that I've been carrying since I was nineteen—it all goes silent.
For thirty seconds, maybe a minute, the world is perfectly still.
Perfectly clear. Like the moment after a thunderstorm, when the air is washed clean, and everything smells like rain.
And then it comes back. It always comes back. Usually worse than before, because now there's a body to account for, another weight on a conscience that's already staggering.
But for that one minute of silence—God, it's worth it.
I'm not a serial killer. I need to be clear about that, even if only to myself.
I don't hunt. Don't plan. Don't select victims according to some twisted internal logic.
I'm not Josiah, who kept forty-five trophies in a hidden room.
I'm something else. Something worse, maybe, or something simpler.
A man with a hair trigger and a moral code that runs hotter than it should.
I see someone doing something unforgivable and the red comes and I act.
No deliberation. No calculation about consequences or exposure.
Just the knife, and the silence, and the terrible peace that follows.
Eleven times. Eleven years. Eleven kills the Brotherhood doesn't know about.
The man beating his girlfriend outside a bar in the East Village.
The dealer selling to a kid who couldn't have been more than thirteen.
The landlord who'd been terrorizing his elderly tenants.
Eleven bodies that were never connected to me, never investigated, never solved.
Gabriel would be furious if he knew—not about the killing, but about the recklessness.
The exposure. The risk I've been taking without his knowledge or consent.
He's cleaned up after me before, when my sanctioned kills got messier than they should have—when I moved too fast, acted without waiting for the council's approval.
But those were Brotherhood targets. Those he could explain could fold into the organizational framework.
These are mine. Private. Unaccountable to anyone except the cracked mosaic of Christ staring down at me from the apse.
I stand up, rinse the cup, stare at the clean water running into the drain.
Tomorrow, I'm done watching.
Two weeks of surveillance has given me everything I need—her schedule, her habits, her routines.
I know the external architecture of Lucy Anderson's life.
Now I want the interior. I want to hear her voice directed at me, not overheard from across a street.
Want to sit across from her and let her read me, the way she reads everyone, and see what she finds.
The idea terrifies me. Good. Fear means it matters.
What would she see? The charming youngest brother, the one with the sharp tongue and the easy smile?
That's what most people see—it's what I built it for.
Or would she look deeper, the way she does with her clients, past the performance to the thing underneath?
The restlessness. The violence. The desperate need for the silence that only comes when someone stops breathing.
She's a therapist. She sits with people's darkness every day. But there's a difference between holding space for someone else's damage and discovering it in the man trying to hold your hand.
I pull out my phone. Open the text thread with Josiah—dormant since the night of the wedding.
How's married life treating you?
The reply comes fast. Good. Really good. Why?
Can't a brother check in?
You never check in. What do you want?
I smile despite myself.
Ava's sister. Lucy. I'm thinking of reaching out. Would it be weird?
A long pause. Then: Why?
She seemed interesting at the wedding. Thought I'd say hello.
Another pause, longer. I can practically hear him running the angles.
Be careful with her, Benedict. She's important to Ava. If you hurt her—
I'm not going to hurt her.
That's what I said about Ava. Look how that turned out.
It turned out with a wedding. You're welcome.
Just be careful. She's been through a lot. She doesn't need an Ambrose brother making her life more complicated.
I stare at the message. He's right, of course. She doesn't need me. Doesn't need my complications, my darkness, my inability to walk past an alley without leaving a body in it. She's a woman who heals people for a living, and I'm a man who breaks them. The math isn't complicated.
But need and want are different things. And I've never been good at denying myself what I want.
I'll be gentle, I type. Promise.
I set the phone down. Look up at the mosaic—those chipped, faded eyes still watching.
"Don't judge me," I say to the empty church. "You're in no position."
I climb the stairs to the choir loft, strip off my clothes, and lie in the bed I built where a choir once sang hymns to a God I've never believed in.
The sheets are cold. The ceiling is high and dark and distant.
Through the stained glass above me, the streetlight outside throws a fractured halo of color across the stone—blue and gold and a deep, arterial red that shifts when the wind moves the branches of the trees along the canal.
I think about Lucy Anderson and the single moment of eye contact that rewired something in my brain. About the warmth she carries, the openness, the fundamental orientation toward connection that's so foreign to everything I know.
I think about the silence that follows a kill and how wrong it is that violence is the only thing that quiets me.
I think about a piece of paper with a name and a date, and eleven years of suspicion that might finally lead somewhere.
Tomorrow, I'm going to meet her. Not by accident. Not through Josiah or Ava or the convenient fiction of a family connection. I'm going to walk into her life the same way I walk into everything—eyes open, knife hidden, burning with a want I can't control.
She deserves better.
She's going to get me instead.