Full Color (ORCA #3)

Chapter 4

CHAPTER

FOUR

DIMITRI

The closer we got to the gallery, the harder my heart beat until I was sure the huge bear shifter who worked as Dasselaar’s hired muscle had to hear it. Dasselaar had left the estate early, before breakfast, but had instructed one of his goons to come get me and bring me to the gallery.

I hadn’t been back since the night Dasselaar had killed the truck driver, and my stomach roiled, threatening to upend itself on the leather upholstery of his black town car as we wove closer and closer to his building in the heart of the city.

Instead of pulling up out front, the driver circled to the back of the building and parked in the alley. Dasselaar liked people to know when he was at the gallery, so he always parked out front, so I wasn’t sure what was different about today, but I was praying the sense of foreboding that crawled beneath my skin was just a stress response to being back at the gallery and not a premonition that maybe I wouldn’t be leaving the premises again. At least not alive.

For days, shipping crates had been arriving at the estate in preparation for the gala and auction later that week. I’d seen most of the paintings before when I’d used my talent to authenticate them for Dasselaar as they’d come into the gallery, but there was one painting I hadn’t seen yet—the one the now deceased driver had delivered.

“Out.” The bear shifter had come around the car and yanked open my door. “Dasselaar wants you to wait for him in the storage room.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak around the lump in my throat and my rising panic.

Dasselaar’s goon punched a code into the keypad by the door and lowered his face so the tiny embedded camera could scan his features. Since the night of the truck driver’s murder, Dasselaar had also increased security at the gallery. I’d heard him talking about it when he didn’t think I was listening, like when we were in the car or while I was in the dining room eating breakfast at the other end of his massive antique table.

The goon—I never knew their names—held the door for me, and secured it behind me. My heart was in my throat as my eyes fell to where the truck driver’s body had been.

But there was nothing there.

The floor was painted a glossy gray just like it always had been. Not a speck of blood marred the surface.

Had I really seen someone die in this room? How could there not be a trace of the crime left behind?

A shudder rolled down my spine, and I clenched my fists at my sides to keep myself from shaking apart. I willed myself to look anywhere but at where the body had been.

Only a single shipping crate remained in the room, and I knew that was why I’d been summoned.

The bear shifter who’d brought me to the gallery today stalked by me, walking farther into the gallery. When I started to follow he held up his hand. “Dasselaar wants you to wait here.”

“Oh, right. Yes. I forgot.” Really, I didn’t want to stay in the room swirling with the ghosts of what I’d seen by myself. But as with everything else in my life, I had no choice.

I positioned myself against the wall and leaned into it, and I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Beyond the wall that separated the storage room from the rest of the building, I heard Dasselaar talking to one of the sophisticated women who worked for him and served as the polished public face of the S. Dasselaar Gallery, but he still kept me waiting. It wasn’t like my time had value. I was his pawn, a tool he controlled. It felt like an hour had passed before Dasselaar finally deigned to enter the storage room, flanked by my driver and another bear shifter who must have been acting as Dasselaar’s bodyguard for the day.

The bear shifters each picked up a screw gun and set to work opening the crate. Dasselaar pulled out a small remote and when they lifted the lid from the container, he clicked it twice. Small red lights flashed at each corner of the crate, then winked out, going dark.

“Dimitri, you know what you need to do.”

I approached the crate slowly, butterflies in my stomach. Dasselaar had been talking about auctioning off the biggest score the art world had ever seen, and I knew this was it. Everything else had been normal, run-of-the-mill, stolen art. Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh, with a few lesser-known pieces sprinkled throughout for the bidder who wanted to part with ten million or less, but I knew before I even saw the piece that this was something more.

Looking into the crate, a gasp slid past my lips. The Evolution of Man , the most revered, controversial, and elusive piece of stolen art known to the shifter world sat nestled in packing foam. If this painting was real, it was damn near priceless. Dasselaar was going to make more money than Midas when he offered this at his auction.

Assuming it was real.

Dasselaar hovered over my shoulder as I held my hand out. With the antitransmutative drugs coursing through my system, it was difficult to pull even the small part of my animal form that I needed to authenticate the piece forward, and I closed my eyes, reaching deep within myself to accomplish even the most subtle shift. Like it always did when I used this skill, my skin tightened, and I opened my eyes. My hand hovered over the painting, but suddenly the normal tightening felt different, my skin warming like I was in the sun. The bell at the front of the gallery rang and a voice distracted Dasselaar, making him glance away from me for a split second. In that time, a strange sheen, like the swirling colors of an oil slick on water, blurred my skin before the color resolved and my skin took on the exact hue of the paint beneath it.

It was Dasselaar’s turn to gasp. “It’s real.” He slapped me on the back, and my hand slid to a different part of the painting. That same pearlescent sheen slid over my skin before the color became clear. Again, Dasselaar missed it. He had his phone out and held to his ear, telling whoever was on the other end that he had the real thing.

But I wasn’t so sure.

My skin had never turned that shiny, mother-of-pearl color before. I’d certainly never seen my skin flicker like that. It was always very straightforward. If the painting was fake, the colors my skin picked up were cloudy, unable to settle on the exact colors. If the painting was real, the color of my skin was indiscernible from the colors on the canvas. As far as I could tell, it had something to do with the chemical composition of the paint and how it reacted with my skin. My talent was remarkably reliable as very few modern forgers had the patience or the talent to reproduce the naturally pigmented oil paints used in past centuries. Even when I ran across forgeries where the artist had taken the time to produce pigments that matched almost perfectly, my skin could detect even the most subtle differences in hue.

This was something else.

I leaned forward and studied the painting more closely, moving my hand around the frame. Each time, there was a slight hesitation, a flash of iridescence, as the color changed.

Fortunately for me, Dasselaar rarely asked me to speak, so I held my tongue, biting back my suspicions about the authenticity of the painting. He had seen what he wanted to see, and that was all there was to it. It was doubtful anything I said would sway him anyway. And any opinion that this painting maybe wasn’t real wouldn’t be appreciated. And my skin did pick up the colors correctly after the momentary flicker, so maybe it was real. Maybe I had too much of the antitransmutative drug in my system.

“Seal it up. Call Victor and have him bring the truck, then get this to the estate.” The bear shifters nodded, and the one who’d driven me to the gallery pulled out his phone. “I’ll be there as soon as possible. Do not let that crate out of your sight for a single second. Make sure it gets delivered to the auction room, then stay with it.”

Both bear shifters nodded their understanding.

I stepped away from the painting, rubbing my hand, and moved silently toward the door. Dasselaar caught the movement and shook his head.

“You’re not going anywhere. I have an important meeting, and you’re going to be needed here. Go wait in the private gallery.”

There was no reason to argue, so I did as I was told, surreptitiously staring at my hands while I moved down the hallway toward the private gallery where Dasselaar kept all his stolen merchandise. The last time I’d been in that part of the gallery building had been the day I’d seen the man I’d been sketching late at night when my nightmares pulled me from sleep. My mind caught on the images I’d drawn last night of his strong, paint-stained hands and the fantasies I’d entertained of the way his skin would feel stroking over my body as I got myself off, wishing I had a name to scream into my pillow as I came.

Movement at the end of the hallway grabbed my attention, and I stopped, blinking fast, unable to believe what I was seeing. Like my mind had conjured him up, live and in full color, was the man from my drawings. He was standing in profile, so he didn’t see me, but I’d know the way his hair fell over his eyes, the strong slant of his nose, and the sharp line of his jaw anywhere. A hint of dark skin peeked out above his collar, and I knew exactly what it would look like if I could peel his shirt away.

Dasselaar pushed by me, hissing at me as he went, and blocked the man from my view. “I told you to wait in the private gallery. Don’t make me tell you again.”

I tried to look past him, but he’d already ushered the man down another short hall where his office was located, and he was lost from my sight. Rubbing my eyes, I tried to take stock of my body. Had the dose of the drug Dasselaar’s minions had administered this morning been too strong? I didn’t trust myself to know if what I had seen had been real or an apparition my mind had conjured up to deal with the stress of being back at the gallery for the first time and whatever had just happened with the painting.

The skin on my hands warmed, and I glanced down to see iridescent colors shining on my palms. I wasn’t consciously trying to use my talent, and with the drugs in my system, I couldn’t take my chameleon form by choice or by accident.

I closed my eyes and willed my hands to look human, but when I opened them again, the colors had only faded by a fraction.

What the hell was going on?

Ducking into the private showroom full of stolen art, I hid myself in the corner and said a silent prayer that whatever was happening would go away before Dasselaar brought his guest into the gallery and made me use my skill. I needed to stay useful to him until I could figure out a plan to get my sister out of Amsterdam.

Then everything could go to shit.

Just not now.

Please not now.