Wren Castellan had lied her way into worse places than a mountain lodge, but she'd never had to do it in four inches of snow with her rental car's tires spinning uselessly in a ditch.

"Perfect," she muttered, killing the engine before it could flood. Through the windshield, the lodge sat half-swallowed by pines, its windows lit gold against a sky the color of a bruise. Fenwick Lodge. Exactly where her research said Damon Voss would be for the next ten days — a man who didn't run a company so much as run a network, the kind of man powerful people called when a problem needed to disappear quietly, permanently, and without a trail. Three anonymous clients had paid her firm an obscene amount of money to find out what he had on them, and what it would cost to make him let go.

She grabbed her bag, checked that her burner phone still had a signal — one bar, flickering — and started walking.

The man who opened the door before she knocked was not what four months of surveillance photos had prepared her for.

Photos didn't carry weight. They didn't carry the way a man filled a doorway like he'd been poured into the frame, or the stillness in him that read less like calm and more like something coiled and patient, the kind of patience that came from never having needed to hurry to get what he wanted. Damon Voss was tall in the way that made rooms rearrange themselves around him, dark-haired, unshaven, wearing a sweater that probably cost more than her car. His eyes were pale gray and moved over her once, slowly, head to foot, with the unhurried thoroughness of a man taking inventory of something he already suspected he'd want to keep.

"You're early," he said. "The appraiser wasn't due until Thursday."

"The storm moved up the schedule." She held out a hand, professional smile locked into place. "Wren Castellan."

He looked at her hand like it was an offering he hadn't decided whether to accept, and then took it — his grip firm, warm, lingering half a second past what politeness required. "Damon Voss. Come in before the storm decides for both of us."

Inside, the lodge was warmer than she expected and quieter than she liked. Exposed beams, a fire already going, black-and-white photographs down the hallway of empty landscapes — mountains, shorelines, not a single human figure in any of them. A man who filled his house with pictures of places no one else existed in, and didn't strike her as lonely about it so much as satisfied.

"There's no staff here," she said, testing.

"There's me." He shut the door behind her, and the sound of it latching felt like the closing of something more permanent than a door. "Everyone else left before the storm hit."

"And you stayed."

"I had a delivery to wait for." His eyes flicked to her bag, then back to her face, something amused and faintly predatory in the set of his mouth. "It seems to have walked itself in early. I find I don't mind."

"I'll try to be a low-maintenance delivery."

"I doubt that very much," Damon said. "But I find I don't mind that either."

He led her down the hallway, and she was aware, the entire time, of being watched with a kind of attention that had nothing polite about it — not leering, not crude, just total, the attention of a man who decided things about people quickly and rarely bothered revising his conclusions afterward.

"The collection's in the east wing. I'll show you where you're sleeping first." He stopped at a door, pushed it open onto a spare, handsome room. "You won't be leaving tonight. Possibly not for several nights, depending on the storm."

"You sound very certain of that."

"I'm certain of a great many things, Ms. Castellan." He looked at her, and something in his gaze made her pulse trip, a warning dressed up as pleasantry. "I find storms are honest that way. They don't leave room for anyone to pretend they have somewhere else to be."

He left her at the door without another word, and Wren stood there a long moment, replaying the particular weight of I find I don't mind until she made herself stop.

Four months of research. A week, she'd told herself. In and out, no complications.

She hadn't accounted for the storm. She hadn't accounted, either, for the sensation settling low and unwelcome in her stomach — the sense that she'd walked into a house belonging to a man who took what interested him and didn't often let it go again.

She set her bag down, and outside, the wind began to howl in earnest.