MASKED AND RUINED

Chapter One

The card weighed nothing. Wren Ashby turned it over between two fingers for the hundredth time that week. Black cardstock, thick as a wedding invite, stamped with one gold number and a wax seal shaped like a crescent moon in a mask. No name. No address. No hint what it opened.

It cost her three months, an expensive bottle of wine, and a favor she wasn't proud of to get it out of a source who worked catering for events he couldn't legally describe. The Undisclosed, he'd whispered, like the name alone could get him fired. You don't ask to go. You get asked. And you never talk about what happens inside.

Wren smiled at him the way she smiled at every source who thought secrecy would scare her off. Perfect. Then I definitely need to see it myself.

Now she stood on a dark street in the financial district at eleven at night, in a dress that cost more than her rent, a black lace mask covering everything from her hairline to her cheekbones, staring up at a building with no sign. Just glass, and a brass door with no handle.

Her heart was doing something complicated in her chest.

This is for Dad, she told herself. This is a story.

Eighteen months ago her father's name had meant something. Desmond Ashby, the strategist who built half the reputations in this city from nothing. Then, over six weeks, his firm collapsed, his clients fled, and the same writers who used to quote him reverently started calling him disgraced. Nobody explained why. Nobody except, Wren suspected, the man whose company had bought the wreckage of Ashby Communications for pennies and turned it into an empire.

Alaric Voss didn't do interviews. Didn't do galas. Didn't leave threads for anyone to pull. A year of trying had gotten her nothing but a reputation of her own — obsessive, one editor called her, right before killing her latest piece.

Three weeks ago a whisper from her catering contact said Voss belonged to a private society so exclusive most of the city's power players wouldn't admit it existed. A place where daylight rules didn't apply. If there was a version of Alaric Voss who let his guard down anywhere, Wren had a feeling it lived somewhere exactly like this.

She pressed the invitation to a brass panel by the door. No beep. No flash. It just opened, silent, into candlelight and low music that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

Well. No turning back now.

Inside, The Undisclosed didn't look like a hotel, though her source swore it was built inside one. It looked like a fever dream. A cathedral-ceilinged room in dark velvet, chandeliers turned down to embers, men and women in masks ranging from simple black domino to gold horned creatures with feathers. No names anywhere. A woman in silver had murmured, Numbers only, always, sliding a finger along Wren's invitation. Tonight, you're Seven.

Seven. She filed it away the way she filed everything — evidence of something she didn't understand yet.

She moved through the room with her reporter's eyes on. Security at every exit. Champagne that never ran dry. Certain masked figures watched more closely than others, like some numbers carried more weight than the rest. She was looking for a signature gesture, a signet ring, the particular way a certain billionaire held a room, anything that would tell her Voss was here.

She didn't find him.

She found something else.

He leaned against a pillar near the far wall, half in shadow, in a mask so plain it was almost an insult to the room's excess. Matte black. Nothing but the sharp line of his jaw and a mouth that looked like it rarely smiled and meant it completely when it did. He wasn't performing for anyone. Wasn't drinking. Wasn't running the socialite choreography everyone else in the room had down cold.

He was watching her.

Not the way most men watched her. Not assessing, not deciding if she was worth the effort. He watched her like he already knew the answer to a question she hadn't asked, like her presence was a fact he was simply confirming.

Wren had interviewed CEOs, prosecutors, a senator under indictment. Eye contact didn't rattle her.

This rattled her.

"You're new," he said, when she'd closed enough distance to be heard without raising her voice. His voice was low, unhurried, the voice of a man who assumed he'd be listened to and had never once been wrong. "The room noticed."

"Compliment or warning?"

"Depends how you take warnings." His head tilted. Even behind the mask she felt his attention move over her, slow and deliberate, in a way that should have felt invasive and instead felt like being seen for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit. "What number are you?"

"Seven," she said, and hated how breathless it came out.

"Nine," he said, and the number sounded less like an identity and more like an offer. "Since we're both new to honesty tonight — you weren't looking for champagne. You weren't looking for company. What were you looking for, Seven?"

The truth. A weapon. A way to save what's left of my family's name.

"Does it matter?" she said instead. "This room runs on not asking."

Something moved behind the mask. Not quite a smile, but its shadow. He pushed off the pillar, close enough now that she caught the low, expensive note of his cologne, close enough to see his eyes were a gray so dark it read black until it didn't.

"No," he said. "It doesn't matter. Not tonight." He held out a hand, palm up. An offer, not a demand. The first thing all night that hadn't felt like a performance. "Tonight you're not a story you're chasing, and I'm not a name you'd recognize. Just two numbers who noticed each other in a room full of people trying hard not to be noticed at all."

Wren should have said no. Every instinct that kept her sharp and employed for eighteen months was screaming at her to walk, to keep counting exits and signet rings, to remember exactly why she'd spent three months and a small fortune to get into this room.

She put her hand in his instead.

His fingers closed around hers, warm and certain, and the second his skin touched hers, something she'd kept locked down tight since the day her father's world fell apart cracked open just enough to let danger in.

"Come with me," Nine said, already pulling her gently toward a narrow, unmarked door at the edge of the room she hadn't noticed until this exact second, though she'd have sworn she catalogued every exit in the place. "There's a version of this room only a few people get invited into. I think you're about to become one of them."

Wren's pulse hammered in her throat as the door swung open onto a candlelit hallway that swallowed the party noise whole the moment it closed behind them.

She'd walked into this building looking for proof that Alaric Voss was a man worth destroying.

She had no idea, as the door clicked shut and Nine's hand tightened around hers in the sudden dark, that she'd just taken the first step toward wanting a stranger badly enough to forget why she came.