His groan was guttural. Raw. The sound of someone giving up everything.
"Mine." He thrust deep and held. I felt him pulse inside me, felt the heat of his release, felt his whole body shudder. "Mine, mine, mine."
The word was a prayer.
We collapsed together. Sweat-slicked, trembling, still joined. His weight pressed me into the mattress, and I welcomed it—the grounding pressure, the evidence of his presence.
My voice was gone. Spent. But I didn't need words now.
He was here.
We were here.
And I had never felt more whole.
Chapter 16
Auralia
Theacrylicpaintwasdrying on my fingers in that particular way that felt like a second skin—thick and satisfying, the kind of mess I used to apologize for before I learned that mess could be beautiful.
The nursery floor was cool through my leggings. Afternoon light filtered through the lavender curtains, making everything soft and golden, and Maya sat cross-legged beside me in an oversized shirt that might have been Konstantin's once. Mine was definitely Maks's—charcoal grey, smelling faintly of his cologne. I'd stopped pretending I wasn't stealing his clothes. He'd stopped pretending he minded.
"Like this?" Maya held up her brush, loaded with orange that had somehow become brown.
"You're mixing too much." I leaned over, guided her hand toward the palette. "See how the yellow gets muddy when you drag it through the red? You want them to blend on the canvas, not the palette. Let the colors talk to each other there."
She nodded seriously, like I was explaining surgical technique instead of basic color theory. Then she applied her brush to the canvas and immediately created another brown blob.
"I think I'm hopeless," she announced.
"You're not hopeless. You're learning."
"I'm hopeless and I'm having fun." She grinned at me, her dark hair escaping from its bun, a streak of cadmium yellow on her cheekbone. "That's allowed, right?"
I loved her for that. Maya didn't need to be good at painting. She was already brilliant at a hundred other things. She could afford to be terrible at this one and laugh about it.
Her sunset looked like a crime scene. She didn't care.
"It's absolutely allowed," I said.
This had become our ritual. Wednesdays in the nursery, painting together while Sophie read in the corner or Katerina napped in a portable crib. The weighted blanket would come out eventually. The coloring books. The particular softness of being small together, being allowed to be small together, in a house where men with guns walked the perimeter and the world outside had teeth.
I was painting something abstract. Swirls of rose and gold that didn't mean anything except that they felt right. The kind of art I'd never let anyone see before—no technique, no purpose, just color responding to mood. Maks called it beautiful when he'd found me working on it yesterday. I'd almost believed him.
Things were good.
The thought still surprised me when it surfaced. Good wasn't a state I'd ever expected to inhabit permanently. Good was temporary, borrowed, something that would be snatched away the moment I stopped bracing for impact. But days kept passing, and good kept staying, and slowly—terrifyingly—I was starting to trust it.
Maks and I had found our rhythm. Mornings where he dressed me in clothes that felt like armor made of cashmere. Nights where he took me apart with his hands and his voice and put me back together with praise that landed somewhere I hadn't known was empty. The collar sat against my throat now like it had always been there, a weight I'd forget about until I moved and felt the leather shift against my pulse.
The authentication work helped too. Three more pieces flagged in the last week alone—suspicious provenance, inconsistent brushwork, the particular tells that screamed forgery when you knew what to look for. Each one another thread in the case against Anton Belyaev. Each one proof that my strange, obsessive brain was useful for something more than spiraling.
I was building something. A life. A purpose. A place where I fit.
Even my website was getting traffic now. The portrait of Maks—the one from our studio session, the one that showed him soft and warm and nothing like the Fox—had generated actual comments. Other artists, mostly. People I didn't know, calling my work "evocative" and "intimate" and other words that made my chest tight with something that might have been pride.
I'd almost deleted it three times. Kept it up anyway.
