The baker's already closed, but Marie's still inside, counting the day's take. I tap on the window. She looks up, sighs, but opens the door.
"Day-old?"
"If you have any."
She hands me a wrapped loaf that's more rock than bread. "No charge. It'll break someone's teeth if I sell it."
"My teeth are very optimistic."
"Your teeth are going to be very disappointed." But she's smiling. "When are you going to paint something people want to buy?"
"When people want to buy truth?"
"So never."
"Probably never, yes."
Back home—if you can call two rooms above an apothecary home—something's wrong. Matthias gave me the rooms above his shop after asking exactly zero questions about why a young woman with paint-stained fingers needed somewhere anonymous to live. That's the thing about the Drowned Quarter: everyone's running from something, so nobody asks what. Perfect for someone whose paintings occasionally reveal more than they should. Less perfect for keeping your belongings, but you can't have everything.
The door to my studio stands open. I locked it. I always lock it."
The Drowned Quarter has opinions about unlocked doors, and those opinions usually involve your things becoming someone else's things.
Heart hammering, I edge inside. Nothing's missing. Nothing's moved. Except—
Someone's been here. Looking at the paintings. I can tell because one's been shifted. Just slightly. The one I painted six weeks ago of a man I saw for exactly five seconds in the rain.
He was buying bread. Normal transaction. Except something about him made my magic go insane. I barely made it home before the compulsion took over, painted him in one frantic session that left me exhausted for days.
The portrait shouldn't exist. I don't know his name, never saw him again. But the painting...
The painting shows someone drowning in their own shadow. Someone who's forgotten that drowning isn't mandatory. Dark hair, darker eyes, sharp features carved by exhaustion. He could be handsome if he wasn't so busy being terrifying.
I've tried selling it eight times. Can't. Every time someone asks the price, I say it's not for sale. Don't know why. My magic gets opinions sometimes, and this one's apparently staying.
Whoever was in here spent time with this portrait. Touched it maybe—there's a fingerprint in the dust on the frame.
That should terrify me.
Instead, I'm wondering if he recognized himself. If he knows I painted him tired and human instead of whatever he pretends to be. If he realizes someone saw him, really saw him, and thought he was worth remembering.
"This is fine," I tell the empty room. "Completely fine. Someone broke in to look at art. That's totally normal. People do that."
People don't do that.
I heat water for tea with hands that barely shake. Nibble the rock-bread that Marie wasn't wrong about. Stare at the painting that someone wanted to see badly enough to break in.
He didn't look dangerous in that moment I saw him. He looked like someone who'd forgotten that gentleness exists without conditions. Like someone who needed somebody to notice he was tired.
The smart thing would be moving the painting. Hiding it. Destroying it maybe.
Instead, I clean my brushes from today's disaster. Reorganize my paints. Set out fresh canvas like tomorrow might be different.
The portrait watches me with exhausted eyes that somehow got painted more beautiful than the rest of him. My magic has opinions about him, apparently. Inconvenient opinions that make me notice things like the careful way he held his bread, like he was afraid of breaking it. Or breaking everything. Or already being broken.
"This is going to end badly."
Saying it out loud doesn't make me stop. Doesn't make me pack up and leave. Doesn't make me any smarter about men who break into studios to look at their own portraits.
