Auralia was Ptichka.
The woman I'd been falling for online—the woman who called me Daddy and trusted me with her fears and made me feel more alive than anything else in my carefully controlled life—was the same person who'd looked up at me this afternoon with wide, overwhelmed eyes. The same person who'd analyzed the Kandinsky with such fierce intelligence. The same person whose face I'd been painting from memory for hours, chasing the ghost of her.
The Discord notification chimed. Another message from her.
I didn't look at it.
Instead, I sat back from my desk and stared at the wall, at the painting drying on its easel, at the face of the woman I now knew in two completely different ways.
I needed to think. I needed to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with this information.
The notification chimed again.
She was worried. I could feel it through the screen—the anxiety spiraling, the fear that she'd said too much, revealed too much, driven me away with the intensity of her disclosure.
I should answer her. Should reassure her. Should play the role of Lis and pretend nothing had changed.
But everything had changed. Everything had shifted beneath my feet, and I didn't know which way was up anymore.
A message blinked at me.
Ptichka: Did I say something wrong? You went quiet.
I looked at it and felt something crack in my chest.
She was worried she'd upset me. She was always worried about that—always bracing for rejection, always searching for evidence that she'd been too much, too intense, too demanding. She'd told me once, during a particularly raw conversation at 2am, that she'd spent her whole life being left by people who'd promised to stay. That she'd learned to expect abandonment the way other people expected sunrises.
I knew this about her. Knew it as Lis, from five months of careful conversations where she'd let me see the wounds underneath her armor. Knew it now as Maksim, from the way she'd fled the gallery like I might chase her, like staying long enough to let someone be kind was more dangerous than running.
The doubled knowledge felt like holding something fragile and precious and impossibly heavy.
I couldn't tell her.
The realization settled over me with the weight of certainty. I couldn't reveal who I was. Couldn't admit that I'd pieced together her identity from details she'd shared in confidence. She hadn't consented to any of this—hadn't chosen to show me her face, her name, her address. She'd shared pieces of herself with Lis because she trusted Lis to respect the boundaries that kept her safe.
Those boundaries existed for a reason. The community had rules about this—strict, unambiguous rules that existed precisely because people like me, with skills like mine, could destroy someone's sense of safety with a few hours of determined research. I'd never violated those rules before. I wasn't going to start now.
Using her accidental disclosure to advance our relationship—either professionally or romantically—would be a betrayal of everything the community stood for. Everything I stood for. It didn't matter that I wanted her. It didn't matter that the wanting was becoming a physical ache, constant and inescapable. She had to choose to show herself, or it meant nothing.
And beyond the ethics, there was the danger.
Anton's people were watching the art network. They had to be—it was their pipeline, their system for moving money through seemingly legitimate channels. Anyone who touched that system became a potential liability. Anyone who asked the wrong questions, noticed the wrong inconsistencies, raised the wrong concerns.
Auralia had touched that system. Three times that I knew of. Her name was in files. Her address was in records. If I suddenly got close to her—if the Besharov family's intelligence officer started spending time with the authenticator who'd verified suspicious pieces—it would look like exactly what it was: someone investigating the network.
And if Anton's people noticed that investigation, they wouldn't target me. They'd target her.
The soft target. The vulnerable one. The woman who lived alone in a converted rope factory with her anxious rescue dog and no idea that she was standing in the middle of a battlefield.
I typed a response.
Lis: Sorry, little bird. Got distracted by work. You didn't do anything wrong. You could never.
The lie tasted like ash. But it was the kindest lie I could tell—the one that would stop her spiraling, stop the anxiety from eating her alive tonight. Tomorrow I would figure out the rest. Tonight, I could at least give her that.
I sent the message and closed Discord.
Then I opened a new file.
