Until I Ruin You (Dark Masked Sinners #2)

Prologue - Damien

The rain hasn't stopped in days.

I walk through Brooklyn like a man with nowhere to be, which is almost true.

The Council meeting ended two hours ago—my fourth since arriving in New York—and I should be reviewing the dossiers Abraham sent over, or returning the calls stacking up on my phone from the London office, or doing any of the hundred things that a newly seated member of the Order is expected to do in his first weeks.

Instead, I'm walking through the rain at eleven o'clock at night, my shoes ruined, my overcoat soaked through, and I couldn't tell you why.

That's not true. I could tell you why. I won't, because the reason is so banal it embarrasses me.

The reason is that my apartment is empty.

Not unfurnished—it's been furnished to exacting standards by a decorator I hired and spoke to exactly once.

Every piece is correct. The proportions are right.

The lighting is calibrated. It looks like a photograph in a magazine about how wealthy men are supposed to live.

And it's empty.

The penthouse in London was the same. The flat in Geneva before that.

The house in Prague before that. Every space I've inhabited for the past fifteen years has had the same quality—immaculate, expensive, hollow.

I move through them like a guest in my own life, leaving no impression on the rooms and the rooms leaving no impression on me.

I'm told this is a symptom of something. Detachment, dissociation, emotional blunting—I've heard the clinical terms from the Order-approved psychologist I saw exactly once in my twenties before deciding that paying a stranger to name my deficiencies was a waste of both our time.

I know what I am. I've known since I was twelve years old, standing in a cemetery in Hampshire, watching my mother's coffin lowered into the ground while my father stood beside me and checked his watch.

I am a man who does not feel things.

This is not a complaint. It's a competitive advantage.

Feelings are liabilities—exploitable weaknesses that make people sloppy, predictable, controllable.

My father taught me that, though not with words.

He taught me by demonstrating what happened to people who felt things in his presence.

My mother felt things. She loved him, feared him, hoped he would change, grieved when he didn't. Each emotion was a handle he grabbed and twisted until she broke.

I learned the lesson early: cut the handles off, and no one can twist you.

So I did. Systematically, thoroughly, the way I do everything.

By the time I was sixteen, the Order's recruiters noted my "unusual emotional composure" as an asset.

By twenty, I was running operations across Europe—acquisitions, leverage campaigns, the occasional removal—with a precision that earned me a reputation and, eventually, a seat at the table.

I'm good at what I do. The best, arguably, though I don't waste time on rankings. Results speak. And my results have been immaculate for over a decade.

Which makes tonight's aimless wandering all the more pathetic.

Damien Cross doesn't wander. Damien Cross moves with intention through spaces he controls toward outcomes he's predetermined.

He doesn't walk through industrial neighborhoods in the rain because his apartment feels like a mausoleum and the silence inside it sounds too much like the silence of a wine cellar in Hampshire where a nine-year-old boy once sat in the dark for two days, waiting for someone to remember he existed.

I stop walking. The memory surfaced without permission, which means I'm more tired than I thought. I catalog it, file it away, restore the blankness that serves me. It takes less than a second. Practice.

The street is deserted. Warehouses and converted industrial buildings line both sides, most of them dark. This part of Brooklyn is in transition—old manufacturing giving way to studios and startups, the kind of urban decay that attracts people who romanticize grit.

I should call my driver. Should go back to the apartment, pour a drink I won't finish, review the Abraham files, sleep for precisely five hours, and begin tomorrow's schedule at six. That's the plan. That's always the plan. Routine is the architecture of control, and control is everything.

I take out my phone.

And then I see the light.

One warehouse, halfway down the block, has its cargo door rolled up about four feet.

Orange light spills onto the wet pavement—warm, flickering, not electric.

It takes me a moment to identify the source: a welding torch.

The sharp blue-white flare of it strobes against the interior walls, casting shadows that jump and twist.

I should keep walking. Whatever's happening inside that warehouse has nothing to do with me, my schedule, or the carefully ordered life I've constructed.

But the light pulls at something. Not curiosity—I don't indulge curiosity. Something lower, more animal. The same instinct that makes people slow down at car wrecks. The need to see.

I cross the street. My footsteps are silent on the wet asphalt—a habit so ingrained I don't think about it anymore. I learned to move quietly in my father's house. Loud footsteps attracted attention, and attention was never a good thing.

I stop about ten meters from the open door, positioning myself in the shadow of a delivery van parked at the curb. From here, I can see inside without being seen.

The space is raw—exposed brick, concrete floor, industrial shelving cluttered with tools and materials. Not a business. A studio. The kind of space an artist works in when they can't afford anything better and don't care about anything except the work.

And there she is.

She's standing at the center of the space, bent over a steel frame that reaches almost to her shoulders.

She's wielding the torch with her right hand, her left steadying the piece, sparks cascading around her in a shower of orange and white.

She's wearing a welder's mask pushed up on her forehead, heavy gloves, a tank top streaked with grime and burn marks, work pants that have seen better years.

Steel-toed boots. No jewelry. No makeup.

Nothing decorative, nothing performative.

Everything about her is function.

I watch her adjust the angle of the torch, leaning closer to the join she's working.

Her arm is steady—no tremor, no hesitation.

She knows what she's doing. Knows the metal, knows the heat, knows exactly how much pressure to apply and where.

The movements are practiced but not mechanical.

There's a fluidity to them. Like a musician playing by feel rather than reading notes.

She pauses, lifts the mask, and examines her work.

And I see her face.

My chest does something I don't recognize.

Her hair is dark and short, hacked off at the jaw like she cut it herself with kitchen scissors.

Probably did. There's a smear of soot across her left cheekbone, a scar on her collarbone that disappears under her tank top.

Her arms are lean and ropy with muscle—working muscle, not gym muscle.

The arms of someone who bends steel for a living.

She's stunning. Not in any way I expected or have a framework for. Not the women I've been around my entire life—sculpted, maintained, assembled from approved parts. She looks like something forged. Like she came out of the same fire as her work.

She's frowning at the sculpture, her lips pressed together, her head tilted. Not satisfied. Seeing something wrong that I can't see because I don't have her eyes, her hands, her understanding of what this piece of welded metal is supposed to become.

She sets down the torch, strips off one glove, and runs her bare fingers along the join she just made. Testing it with her skin. Feeling for imperfections the eye might miss.

My chest does that thing again. A tightness. A shift. Like a lock turning that I didn't know was there.

I should leave. There is absolutely no reason for me to be standing in the rain watching a stranger work in a warehouse at eleven o'clock at night. This is beneath me. Beneath my position, my schedule, my carefully maintained discipline.

She picks up a different tool—an angle grinder—and attacks the sculpture with it.

The shriek of metal on metal cuts through the rain-quiet street, and sparks fly again, catching in her hair, landing on her bare arms. She doesn't flinch.

Doesn't slow down. She's destroying part of what she just built, and she's doing it with a violence that's almost beautiful.

That's when I understand what I'm watching. She's not constructing. She's transforming. Breaking something down to build it back stronger. The destruction is part of the creation.

My mother used to paint. Watercolors, small and delicate—the only form of expression my father permitted because he considered it suitably feminine and unthreatening. She painted birds, mostly. Birds in cages. Birds on branches. Birds in flight. Always birds.

This woman doesn't paint birds. This woman bends steel with her bare hands and doesn't flinch when the sparks land on her skin.

Something is wrong with me.

I catalog the symptoms with clinical detachment: elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, tension in my jaw, an almost physical pull toward the open warehouse door. A desire—irrational, unfounded, completely without strategic value—to walk inside and ask her name.

I don't do irrational things. I don't act on desire. I don't walk into unfamiliar spaces without first identifying exits, threats, and leverage points.

But I want to. The wanting is so sudden and so total that it genuinely alarms me.

I've wanted things before. Power. Control. The satisfaction of an operation executed flawlessly. These are structured wants, wants with clear objectives and measurable outcomes. They fit inside the architecture of my life without disturbing anything.