I was supposed to be thinking about Ptichka.
My little bird. My sweet girl. The woman I'd been falling for across five months of careful conversation, whose real name I didn't know, whose face I'd never seen, whose voice I'd never heard. She'd called me Daddy two nights ago and something in my chest had cracked open and I'd thought: This is it. This is what I've been waiting for. This is the person I want to take care of forever.
And now I was standing in my studio at one in the morning, painting another woman's face from memory, and the guilt was a living thing in my stomach.
What kind of man did this? What kind of Daddy let his attention wander like a stray dog, chasing every interesting scent? I'd built my identity around patience. Around care. Around the particular discipline of waiting for someone to trust you, of earning that trust inch by careful inch, of never pushing, never demanding, never taking what wasn't freely offered.
Ptichka trusted me. She'd handed me pieces of herself I suspected she'd never shown anyone—her anxiety, her meltdowns, her desperate need for structure and safety and someone to tell her she was doing okay. She'd let me see behind her walls because I'd promised not to hurt her with what I found there.
And here I was, thinking about someone else's eyes.
I opened my own eyes and looked at the canvas.
Auralia stared back at me. Half-formed, emerging from shadow like a figure in a Rembrandt. I hadn't captured her yet—might never capture her, not really—but there was something there. The intelligence in her gaze. The wariness. The way she'd looked at me when I caught her, like she couldn't decide whether I was safe or the most dangerous thing she'd ever encountered.
Both, probably. I was both.
I should message Ptichka. She'd be worried about my silence—I always messaged her in the evenings, always checked in, always asked my careful questions about water and food and sleep. The routine mattered to her. The predictability. Missing it without explanation would send her spiraling into anxiety about what she'd done wrong, whether she'd upset me, whether I was already pulling away.
I should put down the brush and close the paint tubes and cover the canvas with a cloth and pretend this had never happened. Should focus on the work that actually mattered—Anton Belyaev's money trail, the galleries I needed to investigate, the war that was coming whether I was ready for it or not.
I should figure out what the hell was wrong with me. Run a diagnostic on my own heart the way I ran diagnostics on surveillance systems, identify the malfunction, patch the vulnerability, restore normal operations.
I did none of these things.
I picked up the brush again. Mixed titanium white with a touch of phthalo green, chasing the exact shade of grey her eyes had become when the fear receded and the thinking took over. The color that had made me feel, for one vertiginous moment, like she could see straight through me.
The ghost of her watched me work.
I chased it until the light changed.
Thegreendotappearedat 11:47pm, and my chest did that thing it always did—that lift, that warmth, that sense of the world settling into its proper configuration. Then the guilt hit, and I wanted to put my fist through the canvas still drying on my easel.
I minimized the browser window I'd been working in. Screenshots from Auralia Hart's sparse online presence—a professional headshot, a conference photo, the interview that mentioned her north-facing light and her rescue greyhound. I'd been collecting them for the past hour, telling myself it was research for the job, knowing it was something else entirely. Something I hated myself for.
Discord opened. The server icon glowed with her presence.
Her message arrived before I could compose one.
Ptichka: Can I ask you something? I need advice and I don't know who else to trust.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She trusts me. The thought was a blade, cutting both ways.
Lis:Always, little bird. What's going on?
The typing indicator pulsed. Appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again, stretching longer this time. She was composing something careful, something she'd probably deleted and rewritten three times already. That was her pattern whenshe was overwhelmed—she edited herself into knots, second-guessing every word.
Finally, the message came through.
Ptichka:I got a job offer today. A strange one. The money is incredible and he seemed legitimate, but I don't know anything about him and my instincts are all over the place. I can't tell if I'm scared because it's actually risky or scared because I's scared of everything.
I read it twice. Three times.
It was a coincidence. It had to be.
There was no way she could be Auralia.
