Leo could drape a burlap sack so it fell like water. He could tailor a thrift-store blazer into something that made strangers stop and whisper. In the narrow, dust-moted studio above a Brooklyn laundromat, he had sketches pinned to every wall—visions of silk cut like origami, leather stitched to seem weightless, colors no one else dared to mix.

But the industry didn’t know his name.

No magazine credits. No front-row seat at Paris Fashion Week. Just a waiting list of downtown socialites and one very patient agent who kept saying, “Leo, your time will come.”

Then the call came. Not from Vogue. From Renaud Moreau, the tyrannical creative director of Maison Nocturne. “My usual stylist quit,” Renaud said, bored. “Jennah needs someone for the closing look. You have forty-eight hours. Don’t waste my model.”

Jennah.

Even Leo, who lived more for seams than for faces, had seen her: the new girl with the sharp cheekbones and eyes the color of rain. She’d already graced three covers. Everyone said she was impossible to dress wrong. But Leo knew better. Pretty models were easy. Powerful ones required precision.

When Jennah arrived at his studio, she slipped off her sunglasses and looked around at the sketches—the half-finished mannequins, the bolts of Japanese wool, the cracked espresso cup on the windowsill. **