Thesilenceintheconservatory is a living thing. It’s a humid, heavy quiet, broken only by the gentle hiss of the waterfall and the whisper of circulated air through thedense foliage. Kaden has left me in my glass coffin, a beautiful, temperate prison designed to soothe a captive spirit. He thinks this beauty will pacify me. He is wrong.
My anger from this morning has cooled, solidifying from a wild, raging fire into a core of pure, cold steel. The memory of his fingers on my throat, the chilling assertion of his power, has not broken me. It has focused me. He wants me to play a game. Very well. I will learn the rules, and I will find a way to win.
I rise from the stone bench, the book of poetry I was given lying forgotten. My bare feet are silent on the damp flagstone path as I begin to explore my cage in earnest. I am no longer just a captive; I am a strategist. I am a spy in my own life.
I walk the perimeter, my fingers tracing the cool, smooth glass walls. They are thick, seamless panels, soaring two stories high to meet a ceiling of steel and more glass. There are no visible hinges, no locks, no weaknesses. It’s a terrarium for a rare specimen, designed to be impenetrable from the inside out. The snow-covered pines of the Alaskan taiga press in from all sides, a beautiful, indifferent audience to my imprisonment.
My gaze drifts to the plants themselves. Orchids, vibrant and alien, hang like jewels from the air. Towering ferns create secluded, shadowy nooks. My mother loved botany. She taught me the names of flowers, the properties of leaves. She taught me that the most beautiful things can often be the most dangerous. I run my hand over the waxy leaf of a plant I don’t recognize.Is it harmless? Or is it poisonous?The thought sends a strange, dark thrill through me. The world Kaden has built is filled with beautiful, dangerous things. Just like him.
I am examining a night-blooming jasmine when one of the silent, uniformed women enters. She doesn’t startle me; I have come to expect their ghost-like appearances. She pushes a small trolley toward a cleared space near the center of the atrium. On it are several large canvases, a wooden easel, a professional-looking set of charcoal sticks, graphite pencils, and tubes of oil paint. Art supplies.
She sets them up with quiet efficiency, her eyes never meeting mine. She arranges the paints, the brushes, the palette, then turns and leaves as silently as she came.
I stare at the setup, my heart pounding a slow, heavy rhythm. This is a new tactic. A new manipulation. The raspberries were an appeal to a simple, childhood memory. This… this is different. This is an appeal to a part of my soul I thought was long dead.
I used to draw. Before my parents died, before Evilin’s reign of terror began, I would spend hours with a sketchbook, capturing the world around me. It was my escape, my way of making sense of things, of exerting a small measure of control over a world that was often chaotic. Evilin, in her jealousy of anything that brought me joy, had taken my sketchbooks, my pencils, and burned them. “A lady does not get her hands dirty with such frivolous things,”she had sneered.
And now, Kaden, my captor, my monster, has given them back to me.
I walk toward the easel, my fingers tracing the smooth, polished wood. I pick up a stick of charcoal. It feels foreign and yet deeply familiar in my hand, its dusty texture a ghost of a long-lost comfort.
This is a test. He is watching. I know he is. He wants to see what I will do.Will I reject this gift, as I did the raspberries? Will I throw it to the ground in a show of defiance?
No. That is the game he expects me to play. That is the reaction of a simple prisoner. And I am no longer a simple prisoner.
My new strategy is to adapt. To use the tools he provides against him. To play the part of his perfect, thrivingSnowflake, all while sharpening my claws in the shadows. If he wants me to paint, I will paint. I will give him the performance he desires.
But I will not paint his beautiful, captive flowers. I will not paint the serene landscape of my prison.
I place a canvas on the easel. I take the charcoal stick, its familiar weight settling in my hand. I close my eyes, and I summon his face from memory. The sharp line of his jaw. The cruel, sensual curve of his lips. The intense, possessive fire in his eyes as he pinned me to the wall.
My hand begins to move, swift and sure across the canvas. I am not just drawing him. I am dissecting him. I am capturing the monster, pinning him to the canvas just as he pinned me to the wall. With every line, every shadow, I am taking back a piece of my power. I am transforming him from my captor into my subject.
But as I work, something shifts. To capture the monster, I must trulyseehim. My mind, against my will, is forced to recall the details. The way a lock of his dark hair falls across his forehead. The surprising length of his eyelashes. The way his eyes, even in their rage, held a startling, intelligent clarity.
My fingers, which had been gripping the charcoal in a white-knuckled fist, begin to soften their hold. The angry slashes become more deliberate, more nuanced. I find myself shading the curve of his lower lip, and my body betrays me with a memory. I remember the feel of that lip against mine, the taste of him, the devastating pleasure he wrung from me. A traitorous heat pools low in my belly, and I have to pause, my breath catching in my throat.
I force the feeling down, channeling it back into the drawing. This is not desire. This is dissection. I am studying my enemy.
I move to his eyes. I try to capture the cold fire, the absolute dominance. But I also remember the flicker of something else I saw this morning, that searching look, the brief moment of vulnerability before his anger took over. I find myself sketchingthat contradiction, the monster and the man warring in the same gaze.
Hours pass. The light in the conservatory begins to fade, shifting from bright morning sun to the soft gold of late afternoon. I am lost in the work, covered in a fine layer of black dust. Finally, I step back.
He stares back at me from the canvas. It’s him. I have captured him. The raw power, the chilling control, the predatory stillness. It is all there. But so is something else. Something I didn’t intend to draw. A breathtaking, masculine beauty that is as undeniable as his cruelty. The portrait is not just of a monster. It is of a fallen angel. A dark king in his prime.
A wave of revulsion and horror washes over me.What have I done?I set out to cage him, to reduce him to lines on a canvas. Instead, I have created a shrine. I have spent hours obsessing over every detail of his face, his form. I have immortalized the very thing I am supposed to despise.
He thinks he is the artist, and I am his masterpiece. But as I stare at the powerful, beautiful, terrifying man I have rendered with my own hands, a horrifying thought takes root in my mind. Perhaps we are both artists. And perhaps, we are creating the same, terrible masterpiece together.
Thirty Three
Kaden
Forhours,Ihavedone nothing but watch her.
My global operations, the endless streams of data, the silent wars waged in boardrooms and back alleys, all of it hasfaded into a dull, distant hum. My entire world has compressed to the single monitor displaying the lush, humid confines of the conservatory. And at its center, my beautiful, defiantSnowflake.
I watched her explore the perimeter of her cage, her touch light and curious, like a scientist studying a new specimen. I saw the moment the art supplies were delivered, the flicker of recognition, of pain, in her eyes. I felt a grim satisfaction. I knew Evilin had stolen that from her. I knew this offering would be a more complex poison than the raspberries.
