Chapter 6 Kazimir #2
"Alternatively, I can handle this in the traditional manner. You disappear. Your brother spends the rest of his life wondering which river."
His jaw clenches. A muscle jumps beneath the stubble. But he holds.
"Or," I say, "you can paint for me."
The word lands between us. Paint. I chose it deliberately. Not work. Not serve. Paint. The one verb in the English language that means something to him.
"A private studio. Materials of any quality you require---pigments, canvases, solvents, period-specific supplies sourced from anywhere in the world. A living space in this building, furnished to a standard that exceeds anything you have experienced. Security. Resources. Time."
I step toward him. One step. The distance between us contracts.
"In exchange, you produce three forgeries capable of defeating the spectral scanner.
The work will take months. During that time, you will live here, under my supervision.
You will have no contact with your family.
You will not leave this building without my permission.
You will answer to me and to no one else. "
His breathing has changed. Faster. Shallower. The pulse in his throat is visible---rapid, irregular, a rhythm that has nothing to do with the calm his face is trying to project.
"A gilded cage," he says.
"A studio," I correct. "With a lock on the door."
"And if I refuse all three?"
"You are not refusing. You are negotiating. Which means you have already decided."
The green eyes blaze. He hates me. The hatred is clean and bright, and underneath it, feeding it, is the thing that makes him dangerous---the recognition that I am offering him the one thing no one in his family has ever offered.
A reason to matter.
* * *
He tries.
"I want contact with Killian. One call. Once a week."
"No."
"A phone, then. My own phone. Unmonitored."
"No."
"Access to the terrace. Fresh air. I can't work in a sealed room---"
"The terrace is accessible under supervision. One hour per day."
"A salary."
"You are not an employee. You are an investment. Investments do not negotiate compensation."
Each refusal lands on him like a stone. I can see the weight accumulating---the tightening of his shoulders, the whitening of his knuckles around the pry bar he is still holding like a talisman. He is learning the shape of the cage. Testing every bar. Finding each one solid.
"Drop the tool," I say.
He looks at the pry bar. He looks at me.
The calculation is visible: he is measuring the distance between us, the weight of the bar, the odds of reaching me before I respond.
He is young, and anger makes young men stupid, and for three seconds I watch the stupidity compete with the intelligence behind his eyes.
The intelligence wins. Barely.
He sets the pry bar on the floor. The metal rings against the hardwood.
I close the remaining distance between us.
Two steps. I stop when I am close enough to see the individual colours in his irises---the green is not uniform; it fractures into jade and moss and a ring of amber near the pupil that catches the gallery light.
His pupils are dilated. Fear response. Among other things.
He does not step back. This is either courage or foolishness. With this boy, it is always both.
I raise my hand. Slowly. Deliberately. I give him time to flinch, because the flinch will tell me something, and its absence will tell me more.
He does not flinch.
My fingers find his chin. I tilt his face up---a fractional adjustment, because he is shorter than me by several inches and the angle matters.
His skin is cold from the night on the gallery floor.
The jaw beneath my fingers is rigid, clenched, the bone sharp under a day's growth of stubble.
His pulse throbs against the edge of my thumb.
I hold him there. His face turned up to mine. His eyes burning.
"Let me be precise," I say. My voice is low.
The gallery absorbs it, gives it back with the intimacy of a confession.
"You are not a partner. You are not a colleague.
You are not a guest. You are an instrument.
A remarkably gifted instrument that I intend to use until the work is finished.
If you perform well, you will leave this building alive and significantly wealthier than you arrived. If you do not---"
I let the sentence end itself.
His breath is warm against my wrist. Fast. Uneven. His body is trembling---a vibration so fine it is nearly invisible, but my fingers are on his jaw, and I feel it the way a seismograph feels a tremor deep in the earth.
"You're a real bastard," he whispers. "You know that?"
"I have been told."
I release his chin. I step back. The distance re-establishes itself between us like water filling a trench, and I observe the aftermath in his face---the flush creeping up his throat, the rapid blinking, the way his hand rises involuntarily to touch the place on his jaw where my fingers were, as if checking for a mark.
There is no mark. There does not need to be. The body remembers pressure with more fidelity than the skin.
"Your phone," I say.
He stares at me.
"The burner in your back pocket. Give it to me."
His hand moves to his pocket. He pulls out the phone---a cheap Nokia, scuffed and paint-stained, the last thread connecting him to his brother, his mission, and the life he was living before he walked into my gallery and looked at a painting the wrong way.
He holds it out. I do not take it. Instead, I reach past him---close, deliberately close, my arm brushing his shoulder---and pick up the glass of water from Yuri's tray. Half full.
I hold the glass in front of him.
"Drop it in."
His face changes. The defiance flickers.
Beneath it, for the first time since I entered this room, I see something unguarded.
The recognition that the cage has closed.
That the boy who climbed through the rain and picked a lock and critiqued masterpieces in the dark is now holding the last piece of his old life over a glass of water.
His fingers open.
The phone drops. The water receives it with a small, undramatic sound---a swallow, a gulp, and then the screen flickers once and dies.
I set the glass on the floor. The phone rests at the bottom, dark and still, a drowned thing.
"From now on," I say, "you speak only to me."
He looks at the glass. At the dead phone. At the gallery door. At the paintings watching with the serene indifference of objects that have survived centuries of human foolishness.
He looks at me.
And in his eyes---green, fractured, burning---I see the thing I was looking for. The thing that makes the risk worth taking, the cage worth building, the game worth playing.
He is going to say yes, and he is going to mean it, and it is going to be the most dangerous thing either of us has ever done.
My gaze drops to his hands. They are still trembling---long fingers, paint-stained at the cuticles, the knuckles raw from the cold. Artist's hands. The kind that take decades to train and seconds to destroy.
A memory surfaces. Briefly. Another pair of hands, younger than these, steadier, spread flat on a table in a room with no windows. The sound they made when they stopped being hands.
I dismiss the image. It is not useful.
And this boy---this impossible, reckless boy---is far too rare to leave to chance.