Masked Stalker

Chapter One

Every Window Had Eyes

An interview arranged over email should have been the first warning sign.

Sienna Cole sat in the back of a taxi she couldn’t afford, watching the city thin out into hedgerows and iron gates, and told herself this was fine.

Normal. A live-in assistant position, six figures a year, room and board included, no experience required beyond discretion and a willingness to follow instructions.

She’d read the listing four times before applying, certain there had to be a catch buried somewhere in the fine print.

There wasn’t. Or if there was, she hadn’t found it yet.

Twenty years old and three months behind on rent had a way of making red flags look like opportunities.

The estate rose out of the trees like something that had grown there instead of being built, all dark stone and black windows, and not one of those windows showed a single light despite the hour.

Six in the evening. Late enough that most houses would already be glowing from the inside, warm and lived-in.

This one sat cold against the sky, and something about its stillness made the hair rise on the back of Sienna’s neck before she’d even stepped out of the car.

A woman met her at the door. Older, silver-haired, dressed like she’d stepped out of another decade, introducing herself only as Mrs. Voss.

“Mr. Ashworth is expecting you,” Mrs. Voss said, and nothing else, leading Sienna through a foyer with ceilings too high and a chandelier draped in a dust sheet, as though the house had been put to sleep years ago and no one had bothered to wake the rest of it up.

Questions crowded Sienna’s throat. She swallowed them. Discretion, the listing had said. Don’t ask what you don’t need to know.

Down another hallway, a grandfather clock ticked with a heaviness that seemed to slow the air around it, and Sienna caught herself counting the seconds between chimes just to have something to do with her mind besides panic.

Mrs. Voss didn’t make small talk. She didn’t offer water, or a coat check, or any of the small courtesies Sienna had expected from a house this size.

She simply walked, brisk and silent, past room after room with their doors shut tight, as though the house had been designed to be passed through rather than lived in.

Once, near a narrow servant’s staircase, Sienna thought she heard something — a soft sound from somewhere above them, footsteps maybe, or the creak of an old floor settling under weight.

Mrs. Voss didn’t pause. She didn’t so much as glance toward the sound, which told Sienna more than any explanation could have: whatever lived above them was ordinary enough not to warrant a reaction, and unusual enough that no one dared discuss it.

They stopped outside a set of double doors at the end of a hallway lined with paintings that had all, strangely, been turned to face the wall.

“He’ll see you now,” Mrs. Voss said, and left without another word, her footsteps fading into the dark like she’d never been there at all.

Sienna knocked twice. No answer came, so she pushed the door open herself.

The study inside was lit only by a fire, low and orange, throwing long shadows across shelves of books that looked older than the house itself. A desk sat near the window, empty. It took her a moment to find him — and when she did, her breath caught somewhere behind her ribs and stayed there.

He stood at the far side of the room, half-turned toward the window, tall in a way that made the space around him feel smaller.

Dark clothes, dark hair going silver at the temples, hands clasped behind his back like a man used to being obeyed rather than greeted.

And across the upper half of his face, from hairline to cheekbone, a mask — not the kind from costume shops, not gaudy or theatrical, but smooth black leather molded so precisely to his features that it looked less like something worn and more like something that had grown there.

“Miss Cole.” His voice reached her before he turned. Low. Unhurried. The voice of a man who had never once needed to raise it to be heard. “You’re four minutes early.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It’s information.” He turned then, fully, and the firelight caught the edge of the mask, throwing it half into shadow.

What she could see of his face beneath it was striking in a way that made the concealment feel deliberate, cruel even — a strong jaw, a mouth that looked like it rarely smiled, eyes so dark they swallowed the firelight instead of reflecting it.

“People who arrive early are anxious, or eager, or both. Which are you?”

Nobody had ever asked her a question like that in a job interview. Nobody had ever looked at her like that either — like he was reading something written beneath her skin, some report she hadn’t known existed.

“Anxious,” she admitted, because lying felt like it wouldn’t work here, wouldn’t even make it three words out of her mouth before he caught it. “The listing didn’t say much.”

“No,” he agreed. “It said exactly enough.” He studied her a moment longer, the way a man might study a painting he was deciding whether to buy — not unkindly, but thoroughly, missing nothing.

“Sit, if you’d like. Or stand. Some people think better on their feet, and I find I don’t much care which you choose, so long as you choose it yourself. ”

She stayed standing. It felt, obscurely, like the right answer.

“You’re wondering why a house this size needs one assistant instead of a full staff,” he said, before she could ask it.

“The staff exists. You’ve already met a fraction of it.

What the house needs, Miss Cole, is someone willing to work within its silences instead of filling them.

Mrs. Voss manages the house. I need someone to manage me — my correspondence, my calendar, the parts of my life that require a face the public hasn’t already catalogued and grown suspicious of. ”

“You could hire someone with more experience.”

“I could.” He said it simply, no argument in it.

“Experience teaches people what questions are supposed to sound like. I’d rather have someone who hasn’t learned that particular performance yet.

” A pause, brief and deliberate. “Your references described you as observant. Quiet. The sort of person who notices things and says nothing until asked. Is that accurate?”

“It depends what I’m noticing.”

Something in his expression shifted at that — not quite approval, but close enough to it that she felt the difference in her chest before she understood why. “Good answer,” he said quietly.

“The listing said everything you needed to know.” He moved closer, and she resisted the urge to step back, some animal part of her brain screaming that distance mattered here, that the space between them was the only thing keeping her safe.

“Live-in assistant. Full discretion. Excellent compensation. What more were you expecting?”

“A name, for one. It just said M. Ashworth.”

“Damian.” He said it like an offering, like something he didn’t hand out easily.

“And you’re Sienna. Twenty years old. Dropped out of your second year of college when your mother’s medical bills outpaced your financial aid.

Currently three months behind on an apartment you share with two roommates who don’t know you’re here tonight. ”

The room tilted, just slightly. She’d told no one where she was going, not even her closest friend, because some cautious part of her had wanted an exit if this turned out to be a mistake. And yet he knew. He knew all of it, laid out clean and precise like a file open on a desk.

“How do you know that?”

“I make it my business to know who I let into my house.” He said it simply, without apology, as though the alternative — hiring a stranger blind — was the absurd option and not the invasive one. “Does that frighten you?”

It did. It absolutely did, a cold thread of it winding through her stomach even as something else, something she didn’t have a name for yet, uncoiled right alongside the fear. Being seen that thoroughly should have felt like a violation. Instead it felt like being found.

“Should it?” she asked instead of answering.

He moved then — not far, barely a step, but close enough that the air between them changed entirely, and some old, animal part of her registered the exact moment real danger had entered the room instead of merely implying it.

His hand came up, not quite touching her, close enough that she felt the ghost of it against her jaw, and for one suspended second she understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with reason, that this man could break something in her — her wrist, her voice, her sense of what a locked door was for — without any particular effort and without his expression changing at all.

It should have sent her straight back out the double doors.

Some reckless, unfamiliar part of her wanted, instead, to see what he'd do if she simply stayed still and let him finish the thought.

For the first time, something shifted at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, more the ghost of one, gone before she could be sure she’d seen it at all.

“That depends entirely on you, Miss Cole. I reward honesty. I do not reward curiosity about things that aren’t offered freely.

” His gaze dropped, briefly, deliberately, to the mask-line at his own cheekbone, and then back up to her face, daring her to ask the question everyone surely asked. “Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

“Good.” He turned back toward the window, dismissing the topic as easily as he’d raised it.

“The position pays two hundred thousand a year. You’ll manage my correspondence, my schedule, occasional errands that require someone with a face the world hasn’t learned to recognize yet.

You’ll live on the east wing, which is fully renovated, private, and separate from the rest of the house.

There are two rules that are not negotiable. ”