1
ELENA
The thingabout masquerades is that everyone becomes a liar the moment they walk through the door.
Not the dangerous kind. The permitted kind. The kind where you’re allowed, for one night, to be someone slightly different from who you’ve spent your whole life becoming. A little braver. A little less careful. A little less aware of all the reasons why you should keep your eyes down and your feelings buried where no one can find them.
I finished my last task of the evening forty minutes ago. Confirmed the catering timeline with the head of the kitchen staff. Verified the security rotation with Kostya, who looked at me the way he always does—like I’m a minor inconvenience with a clipboard—and then did exactly what I told him anyway.
Then, I ensured the floral arrangements on the east terrace had been repositioned per Mr. Petrov’s specifications.
Mr. Petrov.
Even in my own head, I call him that.
I found a guest bathroom on the second floor that I was reasonably sure no one would need in the next ten minutes, changed out of my black work blazer and into the dress I’d folded into my work bag this morning with a feeling I wasn’t ready to name.
Dark emerald, fitted through the waist. The dress made Mara clap her hands together when I tried it on in the store three weeks ago, made her saythat’s the one, Elena, stop arguing with me.
I hadn’t planned to wear it. Right up until the moment I put it on, I hadn’t planned to wear it.
The mask is a full Venetian style, ivory and gold, sweeping up past my temples and curving along my cheekbones; it swallows the upper half of my face entirely. I found it in a little shop in the Village three weeks ago and bought it without thinking too hard about why.
But the mask is only part of it.
My hair is the real disguise.
At the office, it lives in a bun. It has lived in a bun every single day for two years. I’m not sure Roman Petrov has ever looked at me and registered that I have hair at all, let alone that it falls to the middle of my back when I let it down, thick and blonde.
Tonight it is loose. All of it. Mara curled it for me this afternoon, and it sits around my shoulders in waves I don’t normally let anyone see. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror before coming back downstairs and barely recognized myself.
That’s the point.
Do one reckless thing,Mara had texted me at seven fifteen.One. I’m not asking for much.
I was supposed to leave after the kitchen sign-off. Go home, get some sleep, and be back Monday morning. That was the sensible thing, and I have always been sensible.
The dress has been in my bag since Thursday. I’m not entirely sure what I thought I would do with it.
I went back downstairs.
The ballroom of Roman’s Upper East Side estate is the kind of room that makes you understand, immediately and without ambiguity, the distance between your life and someone else’s. I have been in this room before. I’ve overseen its setup, coordinated its staff, and managed its logistics on two separate occasions. I know the layout better than most of the guests currently standing in it.
But I have never stood in it like this.
Champagne in hand, mask on, no clipboard, no earpiece, no reason to be anywhere or speak to anyone I don’t want to speak to.
The chandeliers throw amber light across three hundred people in formal wear and elaborate masks, and the noise is a low, expensive roar. I recognize faces even through the masks—two years of managing the correspondence of my billionaire boss means I know his world by its cheekbones and its posture and the way certain men stand in rooms like they own them.
I stay near the edges because of my old habits. I’m watching the room the way I always watch rooms when I hear it.
“Oh wow.” The voice belongs to a woman standing three feet to my left, beautiful in the sharp way that takes resources to maintain. Red gown, dark hair, mask tilted up like she could not be bothered. She’s looking directly at me. Not at my face. Lower. Her eyes move over me slowly. “Did someone forget to check the mirror tonight?”
The woman beside her follows her gaze and smiles into her champagne.
“That dress.” She says it the way you say something you want to make sure lands. Loud enough for the people nearest to us to catch it. “Honey, I have nothing against curves, but there’s a difference between curves and just not knowing when to stop.”
The heat starts at the back of my neck and works forward. I know this variety of cruelty. It doesn’t need to raise its voice. It has been practiced so long that it comes out like an observation, easy and certain, like my body in this dress in this room is simply a fact worth commenting on for the benefit of everyone nearby.
