The work stretched out before me like a map of a hostile country. I needed to trace the contamination—identify exactly which pieces she'd authenticated, which galleries had employed her, whether any of Anton's people knew her name. I needed to understand the scope of the danger before I could begin to neutralize it.
I needed to keep her close. Professionally. Carefully. With boundaries clear enough to protect both of us. The job offer I'd made as Maksim was still on the table. If she accepted, I could bring her into my orbit legitimately—give her work that would explain our contact, let me monitor any threats without revealing why.
But I couldn't push. Couldn't manipulate. Couldn't use Lis's influence to guide her toward a decision that served my purposes.
She had to choose. And if she chose to walk away—from the job, from me, from all of it—I would have to let her go.
I would have to protect her anyway, from a distance, without her ever knowing why.
The thought was unbearable. I let myself feel it for exactly three seconds—the full weight of what I was giving up, the relationship I couldn't pursue, the woman I couldn't have—and then I put it away.
The painting watched me from its easel.
Auralia's face, half-formed, emerging from shadow. The angle of her jaw. The intelligence in her eyes. All the details I'd been chasing for hours, trying to capture something that couldn't be captured—the particular quality of her presence, the way she'd looked at me when she forgot to be afraid.
I crossed to the easel and let myself look at her. Really look.
One moment. I allowed myself one moment of pure, aching want. The dream of a different world where I wasn't who I was and she wasn't in danger and the only thing standing between us was the normal awkwardness of two people learning each other's shapes. A world where I could walk into her studio and tell her the truth and watch her face when she realized that the man she'd been calling Daddy and the man who'd caught her in the gallery were one and the same.
That world didn't exist. Probably never would.
I pulled a cloth over the canvas.
The Fox had work to do.
Chapter 5
Auralia
TheRavenoccupiedanarrow slot between a dry cleaner and a Korean grocery, the kind of place you walked past a hundred times without noticing. That was the point. Dim lighting soft enough to feel like twilight even at noon. Acoustic panels eating the worst of the noise. A corner booth where I could press my back against the wall and see both exits without craning my neck.
I'd been nursing the same glass of red for forty-five minutes. The wine was good—Delphine had ordered for both of us, because she knew I'd spend ten minutes paralyzed by the menu otherwise—but I'd barely tasted it. My throat felt too tight to swallow.
Across from me, Delphine Okafor waited with the patience of someone who had learned, over seven years of friendship, not to rush me.
She was the only person in my life who understood that sometimes I needed to circle a topic seventeen times beforeI could land on it. Former conservator at the Met, now independent, which meant she spent her days doing delicate restoration work on pieces worth more than my entire building. We'd met at a conference when I was twenty-three and terrified, and she'd noticed me hyperventilating in a bathroom stall and talked me down without making me feel pathetic about it.
That was Delphine's gift. She made the hard things feel manageable.
I'd just finished explaining everything. The email from Maksim Besharov. The meeting at the Vasiliev Gallery with its terrible lighting and its too-white walls. The Kandinsky test I'd apparently passed. The display platform in the walkway, my heel catching, the fall that should have been humiliating.
The catching.
His arm around my waist. His voice in my ear. The warmth of him through my blazer.
I'd told her all of it—or almost all of it. The one thing I couldn't explain was the guilt that sat beneath everything else, constant as a heartbeat. The feeling that I was betraying someone by wanting Maksim to hold me longer. By replaying the moment over and over in my head, memorizing details I shouldn't be memorizing.
I hadn't mentioned Lis. Couldn't. That would require explaining things Delphine didn't know about me—things I'd never told anyone who existed in my physical life. The Discord server. The check-ins. The word I'd typed two nights ago that had cracked something open between us.
Daddy.
The guilt was there anyway. A constant undercurrent I couldn't name or resolve.
"So let me understand," Delphine said. She swirled her wine, a gesture that always preceded her cutting through my bullshit. "A beautiful, wealthy man offered you an interesting job at threetimes your usual rate. He caught you when you fell. He told you the gallery lighting was the problem instead of making you feel broken. He gave you his card without pressure." She paused, eyebrow raised. "And you're trying to find reasons to say no."
When she put it like that, I felt ridiculous.
"It's not that simple," I said. But even as the words came out, I could hear how weak they sounded.
