Chapter Five
All Eyes and No Names
Her dress fit like it had been sewn onto her, which, Sienna supposed, it essentially had.
Mrs. Voss worked the last hook at the back of her spine with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had done this before, for other women, in other years, and didn't intend to make sentimental conversation about it now.
The green silk fell in a long, unbroken line to the floor, dark as bottle glass, catching the lamplight only when Sienna moved.
The emerald mask sat on the vanity beside her, waiting.
"Chin up," Mrs. Voss said, and turned Sienna toward the mirror before she could ask why.
The woman looking back at her didn't look like someone three months behind on rent.
She looked like someone who belonged in a house with a name, on the arm of a man the world had spent years trying and failing to forget.
Sienna reached for the mask with hands that weren't quite steady and settled it over her eyes, watching the last of her old, ordinary face disappear behind green silk.
"There were three others before you," Mrs. Voss said, so quietly Sienna almost missed it, her eyes fixed on Sienna's reflection rather than Sienna herself. "None of them ever got this far. None of them ever wore that mask."
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because in about ten minutes you're going to walk into a room full of people who remember exactly what this family used to be, before the fire, before the mask, before he stopped letting anyone close enough to matter.
" Mrs. Voss's mouth pressed into a thin line, something old and careful moving behind her eyes.
"Some of them will be kind to you because it costs them nothing.
A few of them won't be kind at all, because your presence there tonight means something they'd rather it didn't. I'd like you to be ready for the difference. "
"What does it mean? My being there?"
Mrs. Voss studied her a moment longer, the same weighing look she'd worn since Sienna's first week in the house, and then simply shook her head, reaching for the shawl draped over the chair instead of answering. "Ask him," she said. "It isn't my story to finish."
Damian was waiting at the base of the grand staircase when Sienna came down, and for the first time since she'd arrived at Ashworth House, the sight of him without the study's firelight or the kitchen's midnight shadows to soften him actually stopped her breath.
He wore black, unrelieved black but for the silver at his cuffs, a jacket cut close enough to make the width of his shoulders look deliberate rather than simply large.
He'd rolled nothing back, buttoned everything precisely, and yet the tailored line of his sleeve did nothing to hide the ink that crept up out of his collar at the side of his throat — dark, geometric, the edge of something larger disappearing beneath the fabric that she found herself cataloguing with the same helpless attention she'd given the visible half of his face that first night.
His mask tonight was black leather too, but new, subtly different from the one he wore in the house, sharper at the edges, more deliberately ornamental, as though even his concealment dressed for the occasion.
"You're staring," he said, echoing the garden, and this time there was no attempt at all to keep the low satisfaction out of his voice.
"You're doing it on purpose."
"Doing what?"
"Standing there like that. Knowing exactly what it does."
Something dark and pleased moved behind the mask's edge.
"I've had very little reason to dress for anyone in a long time, Miss Cole.
Forgive me if I'm enjoying having one again.
" He came up the last two steps to meet her rather than waiting for her to descend the rest of the way, and when he took her hand to help her down, his thumb pressed once, deliberately, against the inside of her wrist, as if checking her pulse and finding it exactly as unsteady as his own.
"You look like a woman I have no business being allowed anywhere near tonight. "
"Is that a complaint?"
"An observation," he said, borrowing her own line back at her, the corner of his mouth curving before he schooled it back into something more composed.
"Come. The car is waiting, and I intend to be exactly on time.
Early looks eager. Late looks like an apology. I've decided I owe that room neither."
The gala was held forty minutes outside the city, at an estate nearly as old as Damian's own, though this one blazed with light from every window, cars stacking three deep down a torch-lined drive, the low thrum of music already audible before they'd even stepped from the car.
Sienna's stomach tightened at the sheer scale of it — the marble entry, the chandeliers dripping crystal, a masked crowd moving through the rooms like something out of a painting come slowly, glitteringly to life.
"Stay close," Damian murmured against her ear as they crossed the threshold, his hand settling at the small of her back with a pressure that felt less like courtesy and more like a claim quietly staked.
"Not because I doubt you can manage yourself.
Because I intend for every person in this room to understand precisely where you belong tonight, and precisely to whom. "
The reaction to his arrival rippled outward from the door like something dropped into still water.
Conversations paused mid-sentence. Heads turned, masked and unmasked both, a low murmur moving through the crowd that had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the man walking through it as though he hadn't spent years deliberately absent from rooms exactly like this one.
"Ashworth." A tall man detached himself from a knot of guests near the bar, silver-templed, his mask a plain, expensive black that did nothing to disguise the calculation in his eyes. "I confess I didn't believe the invitation would land anywhere but the fire this year."
"Julian." Damian's voice had gone flat in a way Sienna hadn't heard since the study, all warmth folded neatly away. "You'll forgive me if I don't share your surprise. I recall telling you myself, the last time we spoke, that I intended to reconsider my absence."
"You did say that." Julian's gaze moved to Sienna, slow and assessing, cataloguing her the way she imagined predators catalogued things smaller than themselves.
"Though I confess I assumed it was simply something men say to end an unpleasant conversation.
I didn't expect you to actually mean it. And who is this?"
"Someone who isn't your business," Damian said, pleasant and final, and the temperature of the conversation dropped by several degrees despite the smile he wore delivering it.
"Everything in this room is my business tonight, Damian.
It's rather the point of the evening." Julian's smile widened, showing teeth, and Sienna felt the hand at her back tighten fractionally, a warning she didn't fully understand yet.
"I only ask because it's been a long time since you brought anyone to one of these. The last one, if memory serves —"
"Julian." One word, and something in it made even Sienna's pulse spike, low and dangerous in a register she hadn't heard from him before, not even the night he'd delivered his rules with the calm certainty of a man who'd never been told no.
"I would enjoy this evening considerably more if you found someone else's history to revisit. "
Julian's smile didn't waver, but he inclined his head, a small, deliberate concession, and melted back into the crowd with a final glance at Sienna that lingered a beat too long to be casual.
"Who was that," Sienna asked, once he was out of earshot, "and what was he talking about? The last one?"
"A man who mistakes proximity for permission.
" Damian's jaw had gone tight, a muscle working there that she'd never seen before, something controlled and furious sitting just beneath the calm he'd rebuilt for her benefit.
"We'll discuss the rest of it. Not here.
Not tonight, with half this room deciding what to make of us before the first dance has even started. "
"You keep saying that. Not tonight. Later. Tomorrow."
"I know." Something almost apologetic moved through his voice, softened by the low music swelling behind them.
"I promise you an answer, Sienna. I don't promise you all of it at once.
Some truths take longer to survive telling than others.
" His hand found hers, warm and certain despite everything sharp still sitting in his shoulders.
"Dance with me. Let me have this much of the evening before I have to give you the rest of it. "
She let him lead her onto the floor, and for a while the questions receded beneath the simpler, dizzying fact of his hand at her waist, the eyes of an entire room following them without either of them acknowledging it, the particular thrill of being watched by a hundred strangers and not caring at all what any of them thought.
He danced the way he'd taught her to, unhurried and certain, and twice she caught the flash of ink at his collar again, dark lines disappearing beneath black fabric, a map of something she still hadn't been allowed to read in full.
"You have tattoos," she said, before she could decide whether it was the right moment to say it.
"I have a great many things I haven't shown you yet." His mouth curved, though something more guarded moved behind his eyes. "Some of them are simply vanity. Others are older than that. Reminders, mostly, of things I decided not to let myself forget."
"Reminders of what?"
"Later," he said again, and this time she let it go, because the way he said it — quieter, rougher — suggested the answer mattered more than the ones he'd deflected so far, and she wasn't certain, yet, that she wanted it delivered in the middle of a crowded ballroom.