Somewhere Quieter

Chapter Four

The address wasn't a hotel or a club. It was a private rooftop garden above a gallery in the arts district, up a service elevator that needed a code instead of a key. When the doors slid open Thursday night, Wren understood why he'd called it quieter.

No crowd. No masks scattered through a candlelit ballroom. Just string lights over a terrace of night-blooming jasmine, a small table set for two, and Nine at the railing with his back to her, city lights spread beneath him like something he owned instead of something he was just looking at.

He turned when he heard her heels on the stone. For the first time since she'd met him, he wasn't wearing the mask.

Wren's breath caught in her throat.

He'd covered the lower half of his face with a black cloth tied at the back of his head. Not the club mask. Just enough to keep his promise while giving her more of him than she'd had before. Dark hair. A jaw she'd already memorized with her hands, fully visible now. Eyes that in the warm light read deep unsettled gray instead of the near-black she remembered.

"You came," he said.

"You asked nicely." She held up the ring, set it on the table between them. "Believe this is yours."

"Keep it." Easy, like the words cost nothing, though his posture said otherwise. "Call it a deposit. Proof I intend to keep showing up until you tell me to stop."

"Strange thing to promise someone whose name you still won't tell me."

Something flickered in his eyes. Not quite guilt, not quite amusement. "I know," he said. "I know how it sounds."

"Then why keep doing it?"

He went quiet, studying her the way he had that first night, like a problem he found more interesting than a problem had a right to be. "Because the version of me with a name," he said finally, "has spent a decade making decisions I'm not sure I'm proud of. The version of me on this roof with you hasn't made a single one of them yet. I'd like to keep it that way a little longer. If you'll let me."

It should have sounded like an evasion. It landed like the most honest thing anyone had said to her in a year, and Wren, who'd built a career on refusing to let honesty disarm her, felt her skepticism slip another dangerous inch.

---

They barely touched the food. Mostly they talked. About nothing that should have mattered, about everything that somehow did. He asked about her work with a specificity that surprised her, remembering details she'd only mentioned once. She asked about his life in careful circles, testing the edges of what he'd allow, and found him more willing to answer than she expected as long as the answers stayed shapeless enough to protect his name.

"Tell me something true," she said eventually. "Something you wouldn't tell anyone with a name."

He turned his wine glass slowly by the stem. "I built this life," he said, "to make up for something I lost a long time ago. I've spent so many years making sure I never lose anything again that I forgot how to want something without calculating what it would cost me to keep it." His eyes found hers, steady, unguarded. "You're the first thing in a decade I haven't tried to calculate."

Wren's throat went tight. "That's not a small thing to say to someone you've known two nights."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

She should have asked what he lost. Instead she reached across the table and covered his hand with hers, and for a long moment neither of them said a word, the city humming below like it was giving them a privacy neither of them had asked for.

When he finally stood and pulled her up with him, it wasn't rushed. He kissed her slow, one hand at the back of her neck, and when he led her to the low daybed tucked beneath the jasmine, every part of her that should have been counting exits went dangerously quiet.

This time there was no anonymous room to hide behind. Just open sky, low light, and a man who touched her like he'd been waiting his whole controlled life for permission to stop being careful. He took her slower this time, his mouth and hands everywhere at once, murmuring her name against her skin like it mattered, until she arched into him and every analytical thought she owned gave out completely. He kept his eyes on her even in the most unguarded moments, refusing to let the dark or the cloth over his face turn this into something anonymous. Wren understood, somewhere under the haze of it, that this stopped being research a while ago. This was something she'd have to answer for eventually.

---

Afterward, wrapped in the warm dark, his heartbeat steady under her ear, Wren felt more at peace than she had in longer than she wanted to admit — right up until his phone buzzed against the table, breaking the stillness like a hand closing around her throat.

He tensed instantly, all the softness of the last hour gone in one breath. "I need to take this," he said, already reaching for it, already straightening the cloth over his face out of pure instinct.

"At midnight?"

"Not the kind of business that keeps hours." He stood, moved a few feet toward the railing, phone at his ear. Wren, still catching her breath, watched him with the same instinct that got her into this building in the first place.

She couldn't hear the other side. But she heard him, low and clipped and nothing like the man who'd spent the last hour telling her true things under the jasmine.

"No," he said sharply. "Tell the board I'll handle the Ashby situation myself. I don't need Camille running interference on something I built."

Wren went very still.

Ashby.

Her own name, in a voice she now knew too well, tied to a business decision she suddenly understood, with sick certainty, wasn't a coincidence at all.

He turned back a moment later, phone lowered, the careful mask of composure sliding into place, and froze the second he saw her face.

"Wren," he said carefully, reading the change in her fast. "What's wrong?"

She sat up slowly, pulling the sheet around herself, her voice coming out steadier than she felt.

"Say that name again," she said. "The one you just said on the phone."

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The silence told her everything the mask had been hiding.