The Velvet Game (The Velvet Trap Billionaires #1)

Prologue – Iris Vaughn

“The Clover Club, Miss I.” The bartender in a butterfly mask slides a coupe toward me. The drink is a perfect blush of pink, crowned with a stencil of bitters so delicate it could hang in a gallery. “My twist.”

Every drink arrives asking for a moment before it’s tasted. I oblige.

“You like working here?” I ask.

“We don’t work here, Miss I. We play.”

“Play? Please. You’re on a payroll.”

He plucks an edible flower from the bar’s garnish tray and offers it.

I take it and let the petals collapse on my tongue. “Play,” I echo. “As in, if you love what you do, it isn’t work?”

“Closer,” he says. “Think less office philosophy, more…theater.”

I lean in, my chin propped on my hand. “What else goes on in this theater of yours?”

“Deals, romance. Even a space where TV’s wickedest vampire villain can roam free and claim her victim.” His voice tilts flatteringly over my Katherine Pierce-inspired lace mask and black cocktail dress. All borrowed. Every last detail.

I laugh too loudly, and a few heads turn. I haven’t learned the code here—the right pitch for a laugh, or the angle of a sip. But I didn’t come for approval. I came for friction, the kind that might finally drag color back out of me.

I need this. More than anyone in a room like this would understand.

“Tell me. It’s Miss I with just one letter, isn’t it? Not Eye?” He taps a finger near the ornate cutout of his mask.

“Yeah, just I.” The art world knows me as Ivy, short for Iris Vaughn. My best friend calls me Eye, a play on my name. But most people stick with Iris. Here, I’m just a letter.

He clears the empty coupe. “Another one?”

I nod.

My eyes sweep the room. “Your boss knows how to make the guests shine.” For a venue set in a shingle-style manor, it would have been easy to smother the space in heavy woodwork and drapery.

There are velvet, mirrors, and mullioned windows, but whoever designed it understood restraint, letting the crowd become the kaleidoscope instead.

“Oh, they do,” Butterfly answers.

“They,” I repeat. “So, is that plural? Or just your gender-neutral get-out-of-jail card?”

“That’s a secret.” His smile curves openly. The mask leaves his jaw visible, and he knows exactly how to use it.

Somewhere between his elderflower martini and the aged red, a shock of white cleaves my vision from behind the bar. Nothing should be there. Yet a figure stands startling against the gloom, wearing an imposing wolf mask.

The tall frame is dressed in a white shirt with the top buttons undone, an elegant rebellion against the rest of the male crowd in mostly tailored attire. Light grazes the skin of his chin and throat before slipping over the cut of his shoulders.

Nobody else reacts. Not even Butterfly.

I blink, and Wolf is still there.

“Excuse me,” I murmur to Butterfly while he’s still building my next drink. I leave the barstool with a touch more sway than I’d like, but adrenaline locks me upright.

I step closer.

My God, that figure. I can’t see his eyes, but his stillness is pure predator. My instinct says fear. Yet I’m lured further forward, certain he’s the revelation I came here to find. No man holds himself like that here, his shoulders squared as if daring me.

A few more paces and he’s gone. The wall throws back only my reflection. The damn trick of this place. So this is what Butterfly meant by play.

I move along the mirror until a gap opens.

It’s a private chamber, and in the corner, a woman in black arches against a man in a tux, both of them wearing matching domino masks.

One bare thigh rides his hip, her head tipped back as his mouth finds her throat.

Their moans smear the room as her back rocks against the mahogany wall with each thrust.

He keeps pushing into her, but his gaze lifts to me. His hand extends. “Join us, my dear.”

A ready-made threesome is hardly the prize I’ll settle for. I’m hunting for an encounter that infiltrates my blood and strikes my heart dead center.

I leave them behind, and somewhere between the chamber and the next passage, I see him.

Predatory as ever, he waits only a few steps away, beckoning me in without a word.

Behind the silver wolf mask, one look from him shatters my last defense.

I want what that couple has—no, I need it—with him, anywhere.

Heat slams through me, reckless and consuming, and I chase. Grace abandons me, desire driving harder than sense ever could. But this is his domain, and with the cruelty of vanishing art, he’s gone again.

“Only cowards run from a woman willing to give chase,” I call into the emptiness he left behind.

A sudden presence crowds the void behind my back. I don’t move.

“I’m here,” he says, his voice impossibly deep.

I turn, like a vampire closing in on her first taste. And suddenly we’re face-to-face, a mere foot apart. My prize, my endgame…within reach.

Temptation saws at my restraint. My arm lifts, my hand hovering just above the silver mask, close enough to trace the line of his exposed mouth.

But I want more. I step forward.

He withdraws, long strides pulling him out of reach, taunting me with a distance I can’t claim. A sweep of velvet curtain swallows him whole.

“Wait!” I quaver as I shove through fabric, swimming in the sea of black until I burst into a crossroads of two doors. “Damn choices,” I growl.

If this is bait, I’ll take it. I’m desperate—not for a man, but a vision. Because nothing lit my veins like this since I painted The Crimson Reverie, the “sex on canvas” phenomenon that made me, and the last one that meant anything.

I plunge left into a waiting draft. The balcony opens onto strangers, and laughter trails around me as I move along its length. Men step into my path with questions I don’t bother to answer. A cold breeze rolls through, and the balcony empties fast.

But I stay. Because he’s here. Somewhere. I can feel it.

And I’m right.

A figure moves ahead. This one is not in white but in black, a silhouette pressed against the steep roofline that meets the end of the balcony.

His mask fits tightly, no skin exposed. The height, the line of his shoulders, the smoothness of his stride…

It’s Wolf. Or it should be. On canvas, the outline would match, only inverted.

This isn’t just hunting on the floors of an exclusive club anymore. This is a rooftop most people will never see. Sneaking in as a fake guest is one thing. Earning a night in the arms of the man who may well be the club’s most powerful is legend-making.

I follow his trail, climbing over the stone balustrade onto a ledge that runs like a catwalk beneath the overhanging eaves.

Every runway drill my best friend ever put me through comes back in a flood.

I’ve never walked Paris or Milan, but I trained on platform shoes high enough to break something important.

And tonight? Cocktails and nerves won’t be what takes me out.

The ledge narrows. Next to me is all roof, with the slate shingles at an angle.

“You’re made for this, Iris,” I whisper as I watch him pry at a tile near the ridge.

I keep one hand on the thick wood trim where the roof meets the wall. It’s weather-worn, but solid enough to trust.

I edge closer.

He has removed more tiles to create a hole, and he’s about to go into the roof when he glances back and sees me.

“Bet you never thought I’d catch up,” I say. “Interesting choice for a midnight stroll.”

He isn’t the silver beast anymore. A ski mask swallows his face, a dark turtleneck fits to his frame, and a jacket hangs open just enough to flash the edge of a utility belt and tools. I can’t decide how I feel about this version of him.

“So that’s the trick? A circulating wolf inside, and an electrician on the roof? Planning to rewire the moonlight?”

He doesn’t answer. He only lifts a hand, his palm open. Of all the hands offered to me tonight, this is the one I take.

He grabs me and wedges his boot against the base of a chimney tower. I skid and curse, but he holds tight, dragging me up until I reach him. The moment I’m face-to-face with his covered expression, the shingles vanish beneath my heels.

The bastard shoves me through the gap.

I fall headlong into blackness, with no sense of up or down, until my hands slam onto something narrow. A beam? A scaffold? It doesn’t matter. It’s the only thing between me and whatever waits below.

“Hey!” I yell.

Heat lashes at my skin before I fully understand. Smoke stuffs my throat. Fire blooms beneath me, alive and climbing, and this is not part of any act.

My hands skid over aged timber, losing grip inch by inch.

“Help! Up here!” I will myself to hold on, but I can’t even draw a breath.

My grip breaks.

But I don’t fall.

A hand seizes me, crushingly strong. I jerk upward, locked in place. My chest heaves, air stalling, and I force my eyes up.

Through the smoke—

Wolf.

The mask glimmers faintly, his white shirt only a muted outline.

He hauls me against him, unyielding in the middle of a space already searing and suffocating.

My fight collapses the second his arms close around me.

My face drops against the open V of his shirt, my skin meeting his body heat and the thrum of his heartbeat.

“Found her,” he radios in. “Call Zebras. Prep O-Two.”

He carries me through a passage beneath the roofline. The fire falls behind.

“Who are you?” I rasp. Maybe it’s all theater. Maybe they know I don’t belong, and this is the penalty.

But punishment isn’t supposed to feel this good. And the idea that Wolf and the electrician are the same man no longer fits. This hold is different. He feels different. Wolf, the predator, feels safe.

I force my gaze upward. I see his chin and the black seam where the mask meets skin. Then nothing…

When I open my eyes, a breathing mask covers my face. Two figures in medical scrubs move over me, one a solid dark shape at my side, the other a pale blur. This isn’t a hospital. No hospital runs with a crew like Zebras.

I’m still cradled against Wolf, his head lost in the light above. White on white. He lowers me onto a stretcher and checks my hands.

“Blisters. Nothing deep,” he says, then moves on to check my legs. “She’s good.”

As Wolf leans close, I realize my Katherine Pierce mask is still on. Though really, with such thin lace, he can easily make out what I look like.

He pulls a length of blue cloth from his pocket. “Sorry. Protocol.” His voice is almost indulgent.

He lowers it over my lacy mask, his hands cupping the back of my head. The way he binds me feels ritualistic, almost tender.

The cloth tightens, and my breath surges against the oxygen mask as the bed rolls forward.

We move. Instinct drives my hand toward the blindfold to see where we’re headed, but the bed halts. My wrists are seized and pulled wide to the rails. Cloths wind fast and firm, binding one, then the other. I pull hard, but nothing gives.

“Let me go!” I scream into the oxygen mask.

My body revolts even as my mind insists: Isn’t this what I came for? Consequences be damned?

The bed moves again. A drop in my stomach tells me we're in an elevator, going down.

Then, soon, it stops.

“Now that you’re here,” Wolf’s voice dips, dark and intimate, “what should I do with you, Miss Vaughn?”

The truth hits me like a boulder.

I never crashed the party.

He let me in.