Whispers Behind the Mask

Before The Optics of Ruin

One Night. No Names.

A Vaughn & Sterling Novella

For one night, Ava Crawford wants to be nobody.

At a masked ball filled with six hundred strangers, she slips into a dark garden with a glass of champagne and the hope of being left alone. Instead, a man finds her there. She offers him the same polite question she has used to end a hundred conversations, but he doesn’t take the hint. He stays.

So Ava makes a rule, because rules are what she has: no questions for the rest of the night. Guesses only. One lie apiece. Whoever catches the other’s lie earns one real answer.

What begins as a game turns dangerous when he starts getting things right — the things no one else seems to notice, the things she has spent years making sure they don’t. And somehow, he never uses any of it against her.

Then he catches her lie and asks for his prize: her name. Ava gives him one — the middle name almost no one uses, a truth that is real without being useful. It should feel safe. Instead, it feels far more intimate than giving him nothing at all.

They have until midnight, when the masks come off and the night is supposed to end. Neither of them plans to tell the truth. Both of them do.

A year later, neither has forgotten the garden — or the stranger they left behind in it.

One night, one near-miss, and no happily-ever-after — not yet. Theirs begins in The Optics of Ruin. The Vaughn & Sterling novels are steamy contemporary romance; this novella keeps its hands to itself.