To paint someone truly—to do what she did, what she'd built her career on, what made her Masks and Faces series cut people to the marrow—she had to study them. Not a glance. Not a photograph. Hours. Days. Weeks of sustained, intimate observation. The way muscles shifted under the skin when they spoke. The micro-expressions that betrayed the thoughts behind the words. How their hands moved when they thought no one was watching. The geometry of their mouth at rest versus in motion—how the lips compressed before a lie, softened before a truth, pulled at the corners in a way that revealed whether a smile was real or performed.
She would have to look at Skarreth.
Really look.
For weeks.
At his mouth. At the way that deep voice changed his jaw and throat. At the way light moved across his skin like polished volcanic glass. At his hands.
Her body supplied, without permission, the memory of what his voice had done to her belly when he'd asked her to paint his portrait yesterday. The vibration that had traveled past her ribs and settled somewhere she was not going to think about. Now she'd be sitting across from that voice, studying the mouth it came from, for hours at a time, while her pulse did whatever her pulse intended to do and her skin remembered the heat that rolled off him like something solid.
She put the thought down like a hot coal.
His hands. Long-fingered, enormous, with a reach that could span her entire ribcage. She'd seen them at the auction, gesturing with cultured indifference. She'd seen them in the maze, though she hadn't—she hadn't actually seen that part, had she? She'd been fading, blood loss pulling her under. But he had caught her when she fell. Had lifted her with a gentleness that left no bruises, carried her inside, cleaned every cut and dressed every wound. She set the charcoal on the tray. Wiped her fingers on a cloth.
"Paint the picture," she said aloud to herself. "Get free. Go home."
Home. The empty apartment with the empty studio and the empty bed and the phone that never rang because she'd taught everyone in her life not to bother calling.
She picked the charcoal back up.
The estate revealed itself in pieces over the following hours, each piece a contradiction she couldn't reconcile. She looked too closely. She always did.
The art collection first. Pieces lined the corridors, hung in alcoves, occupied pedestals in rooms that seemed designed forno other purpose than to hold them. Her feet carried her from one to the next with the helpless, almost painful magnetism that beautiful things had always exerted on her—the reason she'd become a painter in the first place.
He had taste. Not the kind that could be purchased by hiring a consultant—the kind that revealed a specific, educated, deeply personal sensibility. A holographic sculpture of light and sound that shifted as she moved around it, never resolving into a fixed form. An alien textile woven in colors that shouldn't coexist but did, with a tension between them that made her fingers itch. A painting—oils, old, the varnish cracked—of a figure in a landscape.
She stood before the painting for a long time. The figure's face was half-turned, caught between looking at the viewer and looking away. The brushwork was fearless. Whoever painted this had understood something about the space between seeing and being seen that most artists spent their lives circling without ever reaching.
Skarreth had chosen this. Hung it at eye level in a corridor he walked every day. Lived with it.
She noted it and kept moving.
The east garden entrance opened off a stone corridor that smelled of wet earth and something sweet. She stepped through into a walled space that was part greenhouse, part wilderness—alien plants she'd never seen climbing trellises and sprawling from beds in organized chaos, the air warm and humid and alive with color. Flowers she had no names for. Vines that pulsed with faint bioluminescence in the shadowed corners. A tree at the center with bark like hammered silver and leaves that chimed against each other in the breeze.
Movement at the base of the tree. A figure—small, slight, lavender-grey skin and cropped dark hair—straightened fromwhere she'd been kneeling in the soil, a trowel in one oversized hand and dirt smudged across her cheek.
Large teal eyes blinked at Octavia. Gold flecks caught the light, though the glow was faint—banked, like embers in a dying fire.
"Oh." The girl's voice was soft, husky, with a musical lilt that rose at the end. "You're the new one."
Octavia's feet stopped at the garden's threshold. "Depends on what I'm new to."
A pause. Then the girl's mouth pulled sideways, almost smiling but not quite. "Fair." She set the trowel down and wiped her hands on her thighs, standing. She was small—five-one at most, with a wiry build and hands too large for her frame. The long sleeves of her shirt were rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms traced with faint branching lines. "I'm Niara."
"Octavia."
"I know. Nadir told me." Niara's gaze tracked over Octavia's face with the quick, scanning assessment of someone accustomed to evaluating threats. "He said you're a painter. He said you were—brave."
The word landed strangely. Octavia crossed her arms. "Brave or stupid. Depending on who you ask."
The almost-smile twitched again. "Also fair."
Niara moved to a stone bench near the silver tree and sat, tucking her legs beneath her with the fluid, unconscious grace of someone whose body was built for perching. She turned a small clod of soil over and over in her fingers—a restless, repetitive motion that her hands seemed to perform without permission from her brain.
"The garden's the best part," Niara said. "If you have to be somewhere you didn't choose, at least this part is beautiful." She glanced up, and something passed behind those dimmed teal eyes. "How long have you been here?"
"This is my third day. You?"
