Someone had seen my work. Someone real, someone professional, someone who looked at art for a living and knew what mattered. She'd called me luminous. Emotionally arresting. She'd looked at the portrait of Maks—the one I'd almost deleted three times, the one that showed too much ofhow I felt about him—and she'd seen something worth showing to the world.
"Auralia." Maya's hand found my shoulder. Warm. Grounding. "Talk to me. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." My voice cracked. Broke open. "Nothing's wrong, Maya. Something's—I think something's right."
She leaned in, reading over my shoulder. I watched her expression shift—confusion to understanding to something that looked like joy reflected back at me.
"Holy shit," she breathed. "A gallery? Auralia, this is—"
"I know."
"A solo show? In Chelsea?"
"I know."
"This is your dream."
The word hit me somewhere vital. Dream. Such a simple word for something so enormous. For the thing I'd wanted since I was four years old, sitting on my grandmother's kitchen floor with crayons too thick for my small hands, making marks on paper that she called beautiful even when they were just scribbles.
For years, I'd hidden. Made my art in private, showed it to no one, convinced myself that wanting recognition was ego and ambition was delusion. The website had been a moment of weakness. A tiny rebellion against my own cowardice, posting paintings into the void without any real hope that anyone would care.
But someone had cared.
Someone named Elena Voss, who worked at a real gallery, who looked at the portrait I'd painted of the man I loved and saw something luminous.
Something worth showing to the world.
"She thinks I'm good enough," I whispered. The words tasted foreign in my mouth. Impossible. "She actually thinks I'm good enough."
Maya's arms wrapped around me. Tight, immediate, the embrace of someone who understood what this meant without needing explanation. Her own path had been different—medicine instead of art, competence weaponized and then stripped away—but she knew what it felt like to be told you weren't enough. And she knew what it felt like to find someone who saw you differently.
"Of course you're good enough," she said against my hair. "We've all known that. Now someone outside knows it too."
The tears kept coming. I couldn't stop them—didn't want to stop them. They felt cleansing. Like something old and wounded was finally being washed away.
Ifoundhiminhisoffice, three screens glowing with financial records that meant nothing to me and everything to the case against Anton.
The room was all dark wood and soft lighting, the particular aesthetic of power made comfortable. Maks sat behind his heavy desk, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, a pen tucked behind his ear in that absent way he had when he was deep in analysis. He looked up when I burst in—no knock, no warning, just me crashing through the door like a storm that couldn't be contained.
The expression on my face must have told him something, because he set the pen down immediately. Closed the laptop. Gave me his complete attention in that way he had, the way that made me feel like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
"What happened?"
The words poured out of me.
All of it—the email, Elena Voss, the gallery in Chelsea, the words luminous and emotionally arresting and solo exhibition. I was talking too fast, sentences running into each other, my hands waving in ways that probably looked ridiculous. But I couldn't slow down. The joy was too big, too bright, demanding to be shared with the one person whose reaction mattered most.
"She saw the portrait," I said, breathless. "The one of you. She said it shows essence, not just likeness. She wants to meet. She thinks I could have a show, Maks. A real show. In Chelsea. With my work on actual walls that actual people would look at and—"
I stopped. Something in his expression had shifted.
Not anger. Not disappointment. Something more careful than either of those. The particular stillness I'd learned to recognize over these weeks together—the way his face went blank when his mind was working overtime, calculating angles and threats and possibilities faster than anyone could follow.
The Fox, surfacing beneath the warmth.
"That's wonderful, Ptichka." His voice was gentle. Too gentle. The kind of gentle that preceded something I wasn't going to like. "When did you start your website?"
The question seemed to come from nowhere.
