Celestine "Tine" Broussard sews for the most dangerous krewes in New Orleans: queens' gowns, captains' hoods, masks that hide men who don't want to be known. She has built her whole life on one rule. Never ask a question you're afraid to hear answered. Not about the father who walked out nineteen years ago and left an envelope of cash behind. Not about the quiet man who has spent a year of Friday nights on her stoop, eating her cooking and never once coming upstairs.
Silas Batiste watches four thousand cameras for a living. For the right families, he makes footage vanish. No questions. No looking. So when a crooked ex-cop comes for Tine's nephew on Twelfth Night, Silas makes the trouble go away before she can ask him to.
Now she owes him. And the price of not asking is about to come due.
Between the masked balls and the secret toasts, a girl's proof gets erased in four minutes at Tine's kitchen table. A camera that could bury her best friend turns up sewn inside her own dress form. And the man who knows every secret in the city is the one man she has never let close enough to learn hers.
By the last night of Carnival, Tine will ask Silas for the one thing she swore no one should ever do:
Put a dead man's murder on a man who didn't commit it.
He'll say yes. That was never the dangerous part.
UNASKED is Book 2 in the Masks of New Orleans series and can be read as a standalone. Intended for adult readers (18+). This is a dark romance; please see the content note at the front of the book.