What the Mask Doesn't Hide

Chapter Five

The silence stretched long enough that Wren could hear the jasmine rustling, the hum of traffic six stories down, her own unsteady pulse in her ears. Nine, if that was even a name worth using anymore, stood at the railing with his phone loose in one hand, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked less like a man in complete control and more like one who'd just watched something valuable slip through his fingers.

"It's not what you're thinking," he said finally.

"You don't know what I'm thinking." Wren stood, pulling the sheet tighter, suddenly aware of how exposed she was in every sense. "But I know what I heard. You said Ashby. Like a business problem. Like a line item."

"It's a common enough name—"

"Don't." Sharper than she meant. Sharp enough that he stopped. "Don't sit there in a mask and lie to me about coincidence when you already know exactly who I am. You've known since the first night, haven't you? You knew my name before I ever gave it to you."

He didn't answer. That told her everything.

"I need my clothes," she said, voice gone flat and controlled, the voice she used for the worst interviews of her career, the ones where falling apart wasn't an option. "Then I need you to tell me the truth, or let me leave and never contact me again. Those are the only two options I want tonight."

He gave her privacy to dress, which she noted, bitterly, was probably the smallest gesture of decency available to a man who'd been lying to her by omission since the first pillar he leaned against. When she came back out, he was sitting, elbows on his knees, the black cloth still covering the lower half of his face like it was the only thing keeping him from saying something he couldn't take back.

"I'm going to tell you the truth," he said, before she could speak. "Not all of it. Not tonight. But some, because you deserve at least that much, and because if I don't, you're going to walk out of here and do exactly what you came here to do — and I'd rather you have real information than half a story."

"That's generous of you," Wren said, arms crossed, every muscle braced.

"I know your name," he said quietly. "Since before you set foot in that club. Your invitation wasn't as stolen as you think."

The floor tilted slightly. "You gave it to me."

"I made sure it was there to be taken. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like one right now."

"Why?" The word came out small, cracked at the edges. "Why would you do that? What could you possibly want from Desmond Ashby's daughter that's worth all this?" She gestured at the terrace, the jasmine, the ring still cold in her coat pocket. "Whatever this has been."

He was quiet a long moment, and when he spoke, the careful control was gone, replaced by something rawer. "I told you the truth about one thing already," he said. "I built my life to make up for something I lost. Your father's name is tangled up in that loss. I'm not explaining the rest tonight. Not because I don't trust you. Because the second I say it, you're going to hear a confession instead of context, and neither version of that conversation should happen while you're standing here in a half-dried sheet at midnight."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It's the truth, as much as I can give you right now."

Wren studied him. The mask, the guarded eyes, the tension in his shoulders that hadn't been there an hour ago when he was murmuring her name like it mattered. Something in her split in two directions at once. Part of her wanted to walk to that elevator and never come back. Part of her, quieter and far more dangerous, wanted to sit back down and ask him to keep going, consequences later.

"I need to think," she said finally. "About all of this. Whether seeing you again is research, or something else, or something I can't afford either way."

"That's fair," he said, and sounded almost relieved she hadn't just run. "Can I ask you something first?"

"You can ask."

"If I told you my real name right now, tonight, standing here — would it change anything that's already happened between us? Or would it just change what you're allowed to call it?"

Wren didn't have an answer. She wasn't sure, pulse still unsteady, chest aching for reasons that had nothing to do with anger, that she wanted one yet.

"Goodnight," she said instead, and left him alone on the terrace under the jasmine, his phone dark in his hand, his mask still on.

She didn't sleep again. She sat at her kitchen table with her laptop open, the ring placed deliberately in front of her like evidence she was finally ready to look at honestly, and started cross-referencing every acquisition, every board appointment, every filing tied to Ashby Communications' collapse eighteen months ago.

It took under an hour to find the photograph.

A gala, three years back, before her father's collapse, before any of this. Alaric Voss in a tailored black suit, unsmiling, a heavy gold signet ring on his right hand as he shook a board member's palm for the camera. The angle was clean. The ring was unmistakable.

Wren sat back slowly, the apartment silent around her, the city outside indifferent to the fact that her entire understanding of the last five days had just rearranged itself into something far more dangerous than a story.

She'd gone looking for Alaric Voss, certain she'd hate whatever she found.

She hadn't accounted for already falling for him first.