Chapter 2 #2
"Need backup?"
"No."
He nods, back to the monitors. I take the watercolor with me on the way out.
In the alley, my truck waits. Black. Older. Invisible. I walk to the driver's side, keys in my left hand.
My right hand moves on its own, faster than thought. The punch lands on the side panel. Metal meets bone. Pain shoots through my knuckles. I pull back. Blood wells across the second and third knuckles.
I look at it. Wipe the blood on my jeans. Get in.
North on I-95, it's two hours to Pristine. The watercolor is on the passenger seat. The pink streak across the corner has dried dark, set into the paper. My knuckles throb with each heartbeat. The blood goes dark too.
I've been waiting nine years to get something solid on Hallstein, and now I only have four weeks to do it.
The cottage is two miles from the town center, dead quiet.
It's four o'clock Monday afternoon. I watched the painter enter his studio an hour back through a gap in the fence.
The daughter teaches ballet until five-thirty — I pulled her schedule driving up, so I have ninety minutes to scare a confession out of this guy. Ninety minutes alone.
The front door is unlocked. Small town. Inside, the air is heavy with linseed oil and turpentine.
To my left, the kitchen; straight ahead, the living room; to the right, a hallway.
I move through each space swiftly, confirming they are empty and that the back door is securely closed.
For a moment, the house feels entirely mine.
But the living room stops me cold. On the long wall above the fireplace hang six paintings, each side by side, each depicting the same woman—this painter's daughter, I presume—at a different moment in her life.
The first shows her as a young child, hair pulled back, clad in a simple leotard, her expression solemn, her eyes nearly black.
Next, she is bathed in sunlight in the kitchen, the light soft against her cheek, picking out the amber in her eyes.
In the third, she sits on a porch swing, a book in her hand, lost in thought, the muscles in her shoulders and arms smooth and taut.
The fourth captures her in her early twenties, perhaps—turned away, a glass of wine in one hand, small breasts and soft hips somehow enhanced by the simple sundress she wears.
In the fifth, she stands amid garden blooms, petals framing her face like a living wreath.
And then the last one, the one I cannot walk past: she sits for him, her dark hair tumbling forward to conceal her face, leaving only a delicate jawline and a bare shoulder visible against the shadows.
I recognize that brushstroke—the same hand that painted my bench this morning, the same command of light, every detail rendered with loving precision. Yet these portraits unsettle me. I stop before the hidden-face painting, heart pounding, my Glock heavy in my hand.
My mission was straightforward: extract a confession, gather intelligence, confirm the painter's story.
But something in me shifts. Instead of leaving before the daughter returns home, I find myself wanting to watch her face when she sees me.
I move to stand directly beneath her childhood portrait—where she cannot fail to notice me—and wait.
Outside, distant sounds drift from the studio, the tinkling of brushes against glass jars.
The house settles around me. My knuckles throb, and thin, dark lines of blood stain my fingers.
Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Thirty. I remain motionless, the paintings gazing down, especially the one that hides her face.
What I came here to do and what I am doing now have come apart. I shift my stance, testing my balance. Then gravel crunches underfoot, a truck door thuds, and footsteps echo on the porch.
The door opens.
She walks in looking down, fumbling with a bag zipper. She wears a wrap skirt over a leotard, her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. Ballet shoes are visible through the open zipper. She is thinking about something else — groceries, tomorrow's lesson.
She closes the door and looks up.
She sees me. Sees me standing under her childhood portrait.
Everything stops. Her body goes rigid. The bag slides to her elbow. Dark eyes — exactly like the paintings, but more. The painter caught truth. The jaw line, the shoulders. But he missed something. There is something regal in her stillness.
My pulse hammers in my throat.
We do not move. Do not speak. Five seconds. Ten.
Nine years of control, collapsing. My body recognizes something it has not recognized in almost a decade. Maybe never. My hand at my side closes into a fist without permission. The split knuckles pull. Fresh blood wells.
She is looking at me. Not through me. Not around me. At me. Her gaze isn't sliding off me, like everyone else's does. And I am looking back. Seeing her. Understanding it in my body, before the thought arrives, that everything I came here to do just became impossible.
She is real.
And I am fucked.