Full Color (ORCA #3)

Chapter 2

CHAPTER

TWO

DIMITRI

“Fuck!” I sat up quickly, my heart racing from the nightmare, and hands shaking, I reached blindly for the lamp on the bedside table. It took me three attempts to turn on the light, but when the warm glow of the single bulb illuminated the space, my pulse finally began to slow.

As much as it ever did within the gilded walls of my prison.

My suite in Stefan Dasselaar’s estate was on the smaller side, but it was comfortable. I had a large bed, an en suite bathroom, and a wardrobe full of clothes I didn’t own that I was meant to wear so I didn’t embarrass Dasselaar when he trotted me out to entertain his friends and reassure his investors that they were buying only the finest stolen merchandise.

For a while, I’d thought the price I was paying to keep my sister safe was worth it. Things could certainly have been worse. The threat of Dasselaar backing out of our deal always hung over my head, but while I was useful to him, he’d keep me around.

Until three nights ago.

Until he killed an innocent man right in front of me.

Until I watched blood seep from the bullet hole in the truck driver’s chest and spread out in dark garnet rivers from under his lifeless body.

Even now, days later, my nose burned with the acrid scent of the gunshot and the metallic tang of blood. So much blood.

My stomach turned over, and I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat.

I knew now that any safety I thought I had as Dasselaar’s little toy had always been an illusion. The truck driver had been innocent, merely a man who’d taken an extra job delivering to the gallery after hours, and he’d paid for that choice with his life.

All because that ill-fated decision meant he knew more about Dasselaar and his dealings than he should.

I had been Dasselaar’s prisoner, his property, for over a year. I’d met hundreds of his clients and seen millions of dollars of stolen property pass through his gallery and the estate. If that truck driver was a liability, what was I?

A dead man walking.

A man who’d been on borrowed time since the day I’d met Stefan Dasselaar.

But maybe I’d known that since the day I’d tried to sell him a piece of forged art. I hadn’t known who he really was then. I’d thought he was just a gallery owner like the hundreds of others in Amsterdam, and I was just trying to make sure my sister had the resources she needed to finish art school and stay healthy.

Then I’d found him in our tiny apartment, his huge frame dominating the space as he perched on the edge of our tiny secondhand sofa, lying in wait, a predator stalking his prey. It was a small miracle that I’d been the one to get home first. I wasn’t sure what would have happened to my sister if she’d been the first to arrive back at our apartment. It made me nauseous to even think about it.

Dasselaar was there because he had discovered my deception and wanted to know how I’d been able to accomplish the nearly perfect forgery. When I’d refused to explain, attempting to lie, saying I had no idea it was a fake, Dasselaar had recited every detail of my life, the threat to me and my sister barely veiled within his words. He could get her kicked out of school, both of us thrown out of Amsterdam, and Athina blacklisted from every art school in Europe. He knew we were in Amsterdam illegally, without visas, and lacking permission from the Cypriot government to leave Cyprus. He knew our parents were both dead, having succumbed to the same rare disease Athina had. Dasselaar knew we had forged the documents we needed to get out of Cyprus and to get Athina into school. And worst of all, he knew we were chameleon shifters.

That was the moment I realized the gravity of my mistake.

Stefan Dasselaar was dangerous, and I had picked the wrong mark.

I should have stuck to selling art on the street, but the money tourists paid for paintings of bridges and bicycles barely kept the lights on, and since we were in Amsterdam illegally, we had no choice but to pay for Athina’s medications through a shifter doctor who looked the other way when it came to things like enrollment in the Dutch healthcare system.

Backed into a corner, I was forced to reveal my talent to Dasselaar—though now it felt like a curse—and Dasselaar had made me an offer I was in no position to refuse. In exchange for him not killing me for trying to deceive him or having my sister kicked out of the Netherlands, I would work for him. He would create a scholarship that funded my sister’s education and paid all her living expenses, including the costs of her medications.

Which sounded great.

But of course, there was a catch.

I would be completely under Dasselaar’s thumb, which meant I would be living in his house, never far from his sight, and I could only see my sister under direct supervision from Dasselaar or one of his musclebound goons.

Which is how Dasselaar’s estate became my pretty cage.

I was no longer free, and now I knew I was little more than a liability.

Killing the truck driver in front of me was meant to send a message, and I’d heard it loud and clear.

My days were numbered.

I should have known the only way out of this situation would end with me in a body bag…or tossed into a shipping crate like the truck driver.

Another shudder rolled down my spine, but the terror that now wrapped around my heart, staining it black, would not abate. The only solace I had was that I knew how I would die. It was the question of when that continued to plague me.

In the few days since the bloody incident at the gallery, only one thing had successfully driven back the nightmares. Pulling open the drawer in my nightstand, I extracted the single luxury Dasselaar allowed me to have as my own—a sketchbook and simple set of drawing pencils.

Flipping through the pages, I studied the image I’d drawn over and over again. My first sketches were of the man as he had been in Dasselaar’s gallery, taking in the Renoir Dasselaar had made me prove was an original. I hadn’t noticed at the time, but the man’s posture as he considered the painting had been off, like it was not a pose he affected often. The lines of his broad shoulders were too tight, and his whole body was too stiff. But still, there was something deeply appealing about him, even if I knew for certain he was not an avid art collector as he had claimed. I would also bet my already forfeited life that his real name was not Calvin Smith.

My subsequent drawings had focused on his face, on the kindness in his eyes when they met mine over the forged Vermeer, on the anger that flashed through the rich umber depths when Dasselaar shoved me away. I’d seen those eyes in my dreams as often as I heard the gunshot in my nightmares, both haunting me in different ways.

In my early sketches, I’d drawn the man’s eyes as they lived in my memory, but over time, the finer details began to change. The scar that marred the stranger’s left eyebrow disappeared, and his facial hair gave way to a smooth, clean-shaven jaw. The black skin on the man’s neck, which had been mostly hidden by his shirt, morphed into a bold vee of black that looked like a thick brushstroke. The lines of his body lost some of their bulk until the man on the page looked only vaguely familiar but achingly perfect.

The two men—the one from the gallery and the one comfortably tucked into the pages of my sketchbook—could have been brothers, but they were not the same. Still, something in me reached out to the man on the page like he was someone real, someone meant for me. Perhaps I had been caged for too long, my mind giving way to madness that could only be satisfied by a fictional prince who looked like someone I’d met once for too short a time.

In my heart, I wanted the stranger who stared up at me from my drawings to be real so badly. I wanted to believe he was the one who could set me free, and as dangerous as those dreams were, I let myself sink into them as I put pencil to paper and sketched him again, this time wrapped in the cool white sheets next to me, his dark brown eyes closed in sleep, his thick inky eyelashes casting shadows on his cheeks. In my mind, we had made love. He’d filled me until my body and my heart couldn’t take more, and then he’d held me in his arms, the safety and security he offered more comforting than any blanket. The quiet moments that followed had woven us together so wherever he was, I was there too. The image in my mind and on the page were so real that I stretched out a hand to feel him, only to be met with cold where there should have been heat.

Like always, I was alone, trapped in a cell of my own making, with only the vaguest fantasy of freedom to keep me company. Tucking my sketchbook to my chest, I slipped lower under the covers, leaving the bedside lamp on as I willed myself to go back to sleep, praying it would be dreamless, knowing that either the nightmares that had plagued me or the sweet dream of my fictional lover’s arms would leave a wound on my soul I had no hope of repairing.

But I’d never been lucky, and the scent of gunfire and rivers of crimson blood followed me into the morning, when two of Dasselaar’s musclebound goons barged into my room to administer my daily dose of the antitransmutative drug Dasselaar used to keep me even further under this thumb. With the drug in my veins, I could shift enough to use my talents on Dasselaar’s behalf, but I couldn’t take my full chameleon form. Dasselaar was arrogant, but he wasn’t stupid, and keeping me drugged ensured I couldn’t slip through his hold.

The needle stabbed into my flesh, and I was certain of only one thing.

No one was coming to rescue me.