Unmasked
Volume One
Cassia Leo
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
About the Book
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Thank you!
Other books by Cassia Leo
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About the Author
UNMASKED
Volume One
by Cassia Leo
cassialeo.com
First Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Cassia Leo
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Sarah Hansen at Okay Creations.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without expressed written permission from the author; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
All characters and events appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
For Jordana
You’ve seen me without my mask and, somehow, you still think I’m pretty cool. So are you.
About the Book Unmasked: Volume One
From New York Times bestselling author Cassia Leo comes a deliciously dark and sexy new series.
I was born into this world unwanted.
I spent the first hours of my life unloved.
I spent the first eighteen years of my life with the parents who tried to shelter me from the harsh reality of my existence.
But you can’t un-write a sad story if the ending is literally written all over your face.
So I moved out and now I hide. I have a night job that pays the bills. Every night, I put on my mask and walk to work.
Then one night, I hear and see something that will change my purpose in life... forever: a murder that will bring him to me.
He says he wants to protect me. And, through a series of events I can’t fully make sense of, I find myself believing him.
But our nightly visits are always cloaked in darkness. I don’t know his face and he will never know mine.
I was born into this world unwanted. I will leave this world unmasked.
Chapter One
The monsters we can't see are the scariest ones of all.
Six blocks and the guy walking on the opposite side of the street is still going in the same direction as me. I don’t spook easily. I’m used to walking the streets at night. In fact, I only walk the streets at night. But something about this guy doesn’t feel right.
I can’t see his face.
This shouldn’t scare me, since he can’t see mine either, but being able to see another person’s face naturally puts us at ease. This is one of the reasons some people despise talking on the phone. And also why I have had zero friends and boyfriends in all my nineteen years on this planet. No one ever sees my face. Ever.
Even when I applied for my job at the gas station. I told the guy on the phone that I had a day job and I’d have to conduct the interview in the evening. Besides, I was applying for the nightshift position at the station. The guy bought it. The day job was a lie. The truth is, I don’t go out during the day. I haven’t been outside during daylight hours in years.
I don’t have one of those diseases that make you break out in blisters when your skin is exposed to sunlight. My reasons for not allowing anyone to see my face in the light of day are much more vain than that, and it started the day I was born. My biological mother took one look at my face and begged them to take me away. I’ve been hiding ever since.
So it shouldn’t make me uneasy that I can’t see this guy’s face, but something about the way his hoodie covers it and the fact that he never turns his head is giving me the creeps.
The gas station is in my sight now. Just a block and a half away. I can make it there.
The streets of downtown L.A. are crawling with all kinds of shady characters at night. It’s like when you turn the lights out on a filthy apartment and all the cockroaches come out of their hiding places. The drug addicts and whores dominate. The homeless and the lost wanderers, picking through the garbage and looking for a place to lie down for the night. Then there’s the drug dealers and gang members who try to lay low, but they have to come out and stake their claim and make their deals every once in a while.
Downtown Los Angeles is not a place where a scrawny nineteen-year-old girl like me should be walking the streets at night. But that’s exactly why I do it. People see me walking down the street and they smile, thinking I’m an easy mark. They can rob me or rape me, maybe even murder me, and they’ll get away with it. I won’t put up a fight. But they don’t know me. I’m far from easy.
The monsters we can't see are the scariest ones of all.
You probably think it’s impossible for someone to be afraid of little ol’ me when I’m walking these streets, but you’d be surprised. Our face is what we show to the world. It’s how we’re recognized. It’s how we’re remembered. Our face is our identity. When you hide your face, you’re hiding your identity, and this makes people very nervous. In our feeble little minds, the only people who hide their faces in public are criminals and clowns.
Everyone’s afraid of clowns. Criminals, on the other hand, are either feared or revered.
Hiding my face is how I make it through the streets of L.A. without getting raped and murdered. Those who don’t fear me are fascinated by me.
Well, that and the fact that there’s always someone watching over me. He watches from a distance because he knows better than to get too close.
I haven’t spoken to my father since I moved out eight months ago. I’ve walked these streets every day since then and I’ve only seen him on a dozen or so occasions. But I know my father. He was black ops for the army until my mother made him quit when he was just twenty-eight. Now he has his own private investigation firm. I’ve only seen him following me in his silver Audi S4 a dozen times because that’s how many times he wanted me to see him.
But even without my father watching over me, I can take care of myself. And no one knows that better than my father. He trained me.
I glance across the street at the guy in the hood and a gold Mercedes SUV drives by for the second time since I left the house six minutes ago. Now I’m even more nervous. I can deal with just about any deadly situation thrown at me. But I can’t outrun a car.
I glance around the familiar neighborhood, looking for an escape route in case the car is working with the guy across the road. The gas station is just a block away on the other side of the street. The guy in the hoodie will get there before me. So I can’t bolt for it and barricade myself inside.
A strange chill passes over my skin as my instincts kick in. I should probably turn around, but I hate admitting defeat. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, half a block from the gas station.
Then the gold Mercedes is back, but it’s not coming for me. It cuts across the double-stripe painted in the middle of the street, driving against oncoming traffic, and pulls up next to the guy in the hoodie. A white Honda driving on the other side of the road blares its horn at the Mercedes. The shrill sound of the horn fades away as the guy in the hoodie approaches the Mercedes.