"Your skin doesn't reflect light the way I expected," she said, more to herself than to him. She was behind him now. He felt her gaze on the back of his neck. "It absorbs it. The highlights will need to come from the environment, not from the surface."
She appeared on his left. Stopped. Her head tilted. The charcoal rolled between her fingers—an unconscious gesture, the same way he turned a blade.
"How many slaves do you own?"
No preamble, no windup. She asked it the way she might ask about the weather, her eyes never leaving the junction of his cheekbone and temple.
He kept his expression carved from granite. "Currently? Two. My previous acquisitions number two-hundred-forty-seven over the past seven years."
She absorbed this without visible reaction. The charcoal touched paper for the first time—a single decisive stroke.
"And the previous two-hundred-forty-seven. Where are they now?"
"They served their purpose."
More strokes. Quick, confident. She wasn't looking at the paper. She was looking at him.
"Served their purpose," she repeated. Flat. "That's a nice way to say it."
She moved to his right side. He kept his gaze fixed on the point she'd indicated earlier, a knot in the wooden beam across the studio, and did not turn his head. Her footsteps moved in a slow arc. She stopped directly in front of him and looked athis face with an intensity that made something behind his ribs contract.
"Did they all get silk sheets, or am I special?"
The blade of her words went in sideways, between the ribs of his cover. He let it sit there. Absorbed it. His face gave nothing away.
"You're a commissioned piece of high value. Your comfort serves the work."
"A commissioned piece." The charcoal moved. "Is that what you call it?"
"I call things what they are."
Her mouth tightened—a hairline fracture in her composure. She stepped back, surveyed whatever she'd sketched, and turned the pad so he couldn't see it.
"Tilt your chin up."
He obeyed. The northern light caught his jaw, his throat, the underside of his brow.
"More. I need the light to hit your fangs."
He parted his lips enough to let the light find them. Two curved points, ivory against obsidian. Weapons. The things that made children scream in the holding pens before he could get them to safety. The things that made his cover work precisely because they made him look like what everyone feared.
Octavia studied them the way she studied everything: without flinching.
"Your buyers probably love those."
Something in his chest folded in on itself. He held the pose. His voice remained cultured ice: "They serve a practical function. Intimidation has commercial value."
"I bet it does."
She drew and the charcoal hissed against the paper, stroke after stroke, building something he couldn't see. Her eyes moved between his face and the page in a rhythm that hypnotized—look, translate, mark; look, translate, mark—her concentration so total that the air in the studio seemed to thin around her.
He sat with the stillness of prey in a predator’s sights. The irony was a barb hooked into the roof of his mouth: the monster, held captive by an artist's gaze. The hunter, pinned like a specimen. Every slaver from here to the Kael-Voss corridor would laugh themselves sick if they could see Lord Skarreth sitting obediently while a human woman he purchased told him where to put his chin.
But they would not laugh at her eyes. Nobody would laugh at the way Octavia Tate looked at a subject she intended to paint. It was the most thorough dissection he had ever been subjected to, and she hadn't touched him. Every glance opened something. Every pass of those dark brown eyes peeled back a layer he thought he'd sealed shut. She hadn't even started the real work yet—this was preliminary, gestural, the equivalent of clearing her throat—and already he felt flayed.
He answered her questions with the cold precision his cover demanded: "Health. Temperament. Rarity. Humans are uncommon in this sector—they command a premium. Artistic ability adds novelty value."
Every word scraped his throat raw. He tracked her responses to each clinical term: the set of her jaw at temperament, the stillness of her hand at novelty value, the single hard blink at premium that she probably didn't know he caught. She absorbed it all behind those dark eyes and fed it into the charcoal, and the portrait taking shape on her page was?—
