I thought about Lis asking me my color level. The same care. The same attention. The same quality of presence that made me feel seen instead of observed.
I thought about the way Maksim said my name like it was somethign precious.
I thought about calling LisDaddytwo nights ago, and the warmth that had spread through my chest when he'd accepted it. When he'd called me his sweet girl. When he'd told me that being mine wasn't conditional on anything.
My throat tightened.
I felt like I was betraying someone. The guilt sat heavy in my chest, tangled up with confusion and longing and the sense that something important was happening and I couldn't see the shape of it.
But I didn't know who I was betraying.
Lis, for feeling this pull toward a stranger I'd just met? For wanting Maksim's hands on me, his voice in my ear, his attention turned entirely my way?
I pushed off from the wall and started walking toward the subway. My legs still felt unsteady. The card was still clutched in my hand.
Tomorrow I would analyze this properly. Tomorrow I would think through the job offer, the risks, the implications of getting involved with someone who tracked "dangerous" people through art world fraud. Tomorrow I would be logical and careful and make decisions based on evidence rather than emotion.
Tonight, I would message Lis and hope his voice—his typed words, his careful questions—would make sense of the chaos in my head.
Tonight, I would try not to think about how badly I wanted both of them.
And how terrifying it was to want anything at all.
Chapter 4
Maksim
Ishouldhavebeensleeping.A sane person would be sleeping.
Obviously, I was not sane.
No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was painting her.
Manhattan glittered through my apartment windows, all those lights belonging to people who were probably doing sensible things like dreaming or fucking or at least not obsessing over a woman they'd met for twenty minutes.
I'd turned my easel away from the view. Couldn't paint the city tonight. Couldn't paint anything except the angle of her jaw when she'd turned to examine the Kandinsky, the way gallery light had caught the edge of her cheekbone and made her look like something Vermeer might have imagined.
I mixed burnt sienna into my shadow tones, working from memory, which was dangerous. Memory was already editing her into something luminous, softening the anxiety in her shoulders,smoothing the rawness around her eyes. She'd been luminous enough in person. She didn't need my help.
Auralia Hart. Even her name felt like something I shouldn't be holding too closely.
The brush moved across the canvas in small strokes, building the warmth of her skin tone. She'd been pale under that terrible gallery lighting—everyone looked like a corpse under those LEDs—but there'd been warmth underneath. I'd felt it when she fell against me. Just for a second. The heat of her through her blazer, the frantic rabbit-quick of her heartbeat against my chest before she'd pulled away like I'd burned her.
It wasn’t a portrait. I didn't have the arrogance to attempt that, not from a single meeting, not from the fractured impressions that were all I had to work with. What I was painting was something softer and more dangerous: the angle of her jaw when she'd turned to examine the Kandinsky, forgetting for a moment to be afraid. The way the gallery's terrible lighting had fallen across her cheekbone, washing her out in places while making her glow in others. The exact set of her shoulders when she'd straightened after delivering her verdict on the painting—confident, certain, inhabiting her expertise like armor.
She'd been magnificent in that moment. Completely herself.
I loaded my palette knife with burnt sienna and dragged it through the shadow tones I'd built up along her jaw. The warmth wasn't right yet. Her skin had been pale—too pale, I suspected, from too many hours indoors with her UV torches and her spectrophotometers—but there'd been warmth underneath. A flush that rose when she got excited about brushwork, when she forgot to be self-conscious and let her brain run free.
Memory was a dangerous thing. I knew this. I'd spent years learning to distrust my own recollections, to verify everything twice, to assume that what I remembered was already being edited by what I wanted to believe. Memory made liars ofeveryone. Made saints of the dead and monsters of the living and angels of beautiful women who'd stumbled into your arms for three seconds before fleeing like you'd burned her.
But I couldn't stop seeing her face.
The ring. I needed to capture the ring somehow—that thin gold band she'd twisted compulsively while she talked, turning it around and around her finger like a rosary. She'd touched it constantly, grounding herself, and I'd watched her fingers move and thought about what they would look like wrapped around a paintbrush. Around a pen. Around—
I set down the palette knife. Pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness.
This was wrong. This was so profoundly wrong that I should have been ashamed, and I was ashamed, but the shame wasn't stopping anything.
