Chapter One #2
“Which are?”
“You do not enter the west wing under any circumstance.” He said it the way other men might recite a weather report, flat and final.
“And you do not remove the mask. Not touch it, not question it, not attempt to see beneath it. If either rule is broken, your employment ends that same hour, and you leave this house and never speak of it again. Are we clear?”
“May I ask why?” The question was out before she could stop it, and she braced immediately for the same flat refusal he’d given the mask.
But he only tilted his head, considering her the way he might consider whether a question deserved an answer at all.
“The west wing is closed for renovation that will never finish,” he said, and there was something almost wry in it, some dark humor buried too deep to fully surface.
“As for the mask — people ask that question expecting a story that will satisfy their curiosity and then let them stop thinking about me. I’ve found it’s easier not to give them the chance to start. ”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“No,” he agreed, and this time the ghost of a smile did reach his eyes, brief as a struck match.
“It isn’t. You’ll find I’m very good at that.
Answering enough to seem forthcoming without actually telling you anything at all.
It’s a skill. I’d recommend developing one of your own, if you intend to survive working here. ”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a kindness,” he said. “Threats are for people I intend to lose. I don’t intend to lose you, Miss Cole.” He let that sit in the air between them a moment, unhurried, watching to see how it landed. “Not yet, at least.”
Every rational instinct Sienna owned was screaming at her to walk back out the double doors, down the hallway of paintings turned to the wall, into the taxi, and never look back.
And yet she found herself nodding instead, something in his voice pulling an answer out of her before her fear could finish arguing its case.
“Clear,” she said.
“Then welcome to Ashworth House.” He didn’t offer his hand.
Men like him, she was already learning, didn’t need to touch something to claim it.
“Mrs. Voss will show you to your rooms. We’ll discuss your duties in full tomorrow morning, seven o’clock, this study.
Don’t be late. And don’t,” he added, almost as an afterthought, though nothing about him felt like it contained afterthoughts, “be early either. Four minutes was charming once. It won’t be twice. ”
She should have laughed it off as arrogance. Instead she felt it land somewhere low in her chest, a small thrill she immediately hated herself for.
Her rooms in the east wing were larger than the entire apartment she shared back in the city — a bedroom with a bay window overlooking gardens gone wild with neglect, a sitting room, a bathroom with fixtures that looked like they cost more than her mother’s surgery had.
Mrs. Voss left her at the door with a folder of house rules and a curt instruction to ring the bell in the hallway if she needed anything before morning.
Sienna didn’t ring the bell. She wandered the sitting room instead, running her fingers along the spines of books no one had touched in years, opening a wardrobe already stocked with clothes in her exact size — a detail she chose not to examine too closely, because examining it meant admitting he’d planned for her arrival long before she’d signed anything.
A note sat on the desk in careful, slanted handwriting: Breakfast is at seven.
I am rarely early and never late. Do try to match one of those, at least. — D.A.
She read it twice, then a third time, before setting it down like it might bite her.
Eventually she sat on the edge of the bed, going over the conversation in the study, turning it like a stone in her palm, looking for the crack that would tell her what kind of man she’d just agreed to live with.
Two hundred thousand dollars a year. A house with more empty rooms than a hotel.
A man who’d read her financial history like a bedtime story and delivered his rules with the calm certainty of someone who had never once been told no and had stopped expecting to be.
She should have been afraid. She was afraid, technically — some old, sensible part of her brain kept flagging every detail as a reason to leave in the morning and never look back.
But fear, she was discovering, could sit right alongside something else entirely, something that didn’t have a clean name yet, coiled low in her stomach every time she replayed the low, unhurried sound of his voice.
He’d known things about her no employer should know.
He’d built a wall of a rule around a scrap of leather covering half his face, delivered with the seriousness of a man protecting something far larger than vanity.
And beneath both of those facts sat a third, harder to name: the way he’d looked at her, like he’d been waiting for this exact moment far longer than a single interview could explain.
It was near midnight when she noticed the window.
Her sitting room faced the overgrown gardens, and past them, the dark bulk of what she assumed was the forbidden west wing — a separate structure, older than the rest of the house, no lights burning in any of its windows.
Except one. Third floor, far left. A single square of pale light, and in it, unmistakably, a shape standing motionless at the glass.
Watching her window.
Sienna’s pulse kicked hard against her throat.
She told herself it could be Mrs. Voss, could be some trick of the moonlight, could be nothing at all.
But she knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic, exactly who was standing in that window, exactly whose eyes were fixed on her lit room from across a garden he’d apparently let go to ruin on purpose.
She didn’t move to close the curtains. Some reckless, dangerous part of her didn’t want to.
Instead she sat very still, and let him watch, and told herself the shiver running down her spine was fear and nothing else — even as some quieter, more honest part of her understood it was already becoming something else entirely.
The shape in the window didn’t move for a long time. Neither did she.
When she finally rose to draw the curtains, her hand paused on the fabric, some old instinct whispering that closing them now, after all this, wouldn’t shut anything out. It would only tell him she’d noticed. That she’d been watching him watch her, the whole time, and hadn’t looked away first.
She thought of the note on the desk, of the wardrobe stocked in her size, of a man who’d recited her mother’s medical debt like it was public record.
Everything about this house should have sent her running the moment the taxi pulled away down the drive.
And yet here she was instead, standing at a window at midnight, letting a stranger in a mask memorize the shape of her silhouette through the glass, and feeling something distinctly unlike fear settle low in her chest while she did it.
She let the curtain fall anyway. Across the garden, a moment later, the light in the west wing went dark.
Sienna lay awake long after, listening to a house that felt less like a building and more like something with lungs, something breathing slow and patient around her, waiting to see what she’d do next.
Somewhere in the dark beyond her window, she knew he was still awake too.
She couldn’t have explained how she knew it, only that the certainty sat in her chest as solid as the walls around her, as though the house itself had told her: he doesn’t sleep well, and he sleeps even worse now that you’re under his roof.
Tomorrow there would be rules to learn, correspondence to organize, a job to actually do.
Tonight there was only this — the memory of a voice that never rose above a murmur and somehow still commanded every corner of a room, the shape of a man standing motionless behind glass because watching her was easier, apparently, than approaching her outright.
She didn’t have an answer yet, not to what she was doing here, not to what she was going to feel about it by morning.
But some unfamiliar, unwelcome part of her already suspected she wouldn’t fight very hard to find one — and that admission alone, whispered only to the dark of an unfamiliar room, frightened her more than anything he’d said all evening.