Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
RORY
The church lead is a revelation.
I have been grinding it for two days. The salvage material arrived in a crate---thirty kilograms of medieval roofing lead, grey and heavy. I cut it into strips, melted it in a ceramic crucible, and now the powder forming under the muller is nothing like modern lead white.
It is alive. The particles are irregular---coarse, angular, catching the north light in a scatter pattern that modern manufacturing cannot replicate.
When I mix it with the UV-aged linseed oil, the paste has a weight that makes me want to weep, because this is what Modigliani's hand felt.
The specific gravity of paint made when art was still a physical act.
The music is loud. A portable speaker connected to an old iPod that Kazimir permitted because it has no internet. Radiohead, Massive Attack, the Cure, Portishead---music that sounds like the inside of my head.
I am painting. The second forgery---a Soutine, Carcass of Beef, 1925---is on the large easel, and I am deep in the red.
The Soutine palette is a haemorrhage---all blood reds and bruised purples and the sickly yellow of exposed fat.
I am painting with my hands as much as my brushes, smearing church-lead white into wet crimson, and the paint is on my fingers, my forearms, my face, the front of the white shirt that I have stopped caring about because staining it feels like a small, daily act of vandalism.
The music fills the studio. The bass line of Portishead's "Glory Box" vibrates in the concrete floor. I am completely submerged---the state where my hands move faster than my brain, where the noise falls away and the paint speaks, and I am free, and the freedom is the only honest thing in my life.
The music stops.
The silence hits me like a wall. My hands freeze on the canvas. The studio, which was full and alive and throbbing with sound, is suddenly a vacuum, and in the vacuum I hear the click of the speaker being switched off and the sound of shoes on concrete.
I don't turn around. The room has changed---pressure dropping, every nerve reorienting toward the approaching mass.
"The Soutine is progressing."
His voice is close. Closer than his usual three feet. My body responds before my brain---a tightening, a heat, a pull in the pit of my stomach that has been building for days.
"It's getting there." My voice sounds rough. I turn around.
He is wearing the charcoal suit. No tie. Collar open. His grey eyes are on the canvas behind me, reading the Soutine completely, methodically.
His gaze shifts to me. The paint-stained shirt. The crimson on my forearms. The smear of cadmium red across my cheekbone. The way he looks at me makes my breath catch because it is not the look of a man assessing an instrument.
It is hunger. Controlled, leashed, held behind the grey eyes with the same discipline he applies to everything, but hunger. The kind that has weight.
I step toward him. One step. The distance halves. My hand is still wet with church-lead white and cadmium red, and I am high on the work and the silence and the charged space between us, and I do something that is either the bravest or the stupidest thing I have done since I climbed onto his roof.
I press my palm flat against his chest.
The paint transfers. A handprint---my handprint, red and white, smeared across the charcoal wool of his suit jacket directly over his heart. The mark is vivid, obscene, a vandalism of his perfection that costs more in dry cleaning than I have earned in my life.
His eyes drop to the handprint. His face doesn't change. Nothing moves. The stillness is the kind I have learned to fear---the stillness that precedes the storm, the held breath before the hand falls.
He looks up. His eyes meet mine. The grey is darker than I have seen it---the pupils dilated, swallowing the colour the way a black hole swallows light.
"That," he says quietly, "was a mistake."
His hand comes out of his pocket. It finds my jaw. The grip is different from every grip before---not corrective, not parental. Possessive. His thumb presses into the hinge of my jaw and he pulls me forward and his mouth finds mine.
The kiss is a collision. His mouth is hard and certain and his tongue finds mine, and the sound I make is the sound from the study---the raw admission that my body has been waiting for this since his hand closed around my wrist at the club.
My painted hands grip his jacket. Red and white smear across his shoulders, his lapels, the charcoal fabric ruined in streaks that look like wounds.
I don't care. He doesn't stop me. His free hand finds my hip, and he walks me backward until my spine hits the edge of the worktable, and the jars of pigment rattle, and the marble slab slides an inch, and my body is pinned between the table's edge and the solid wall of him.
He pulls back. A centimetre. His forehead rests against mine.
His breath is uneven---the first time I have heard it uneven, the first crack in the metronomic control---and his hand is still on my jaw, and his thumb traces the cadmium red on my cheekbone, smearing it further, painting me with my own colour.
"You want me to ruin you." His voice is low. Raw at the edges. It is not a question.
"Yes."
The word is the truest thing I have ever said.
* * *
He lifts me onto the worktable.
The jars scatter. Pigment spills---lapis lazuli, a blue so deep it bleeds across the wood like a bruise forming in fast-forward.
My legs wrap around his waist, and his mouth is on my throat, and his teeth find the tendon that runs from my jaw to my collarbone, and the bite is sharp enough to make me arch and grab the back of his head with paint-slicked fingers.
His hands are on my shirt. He pulls it open---buttons scatter across the concrete---and his palms are on my bare chest, warm and dry and steady, and the contrast between his composure and my chaos makes me want to scream.
I pull at his jacket. The ruined charcoal wool falls to the floor.
I am pulling at his shirt, leaving red prints across the white cotton---fingerprints, palm prints, the marks of my body written on his in pigment that will not wash out.
He lets me mark him. The permission is more intimate than the contact.
His shirt comes off. His chest is hard, mapped with the scars of a life that was violent long before it was elegant.
A raised line beneath his left collarbone---the bullet from Vladivostok.
Older marks, faded, the history of a body that has been hurt and has healed without softening.
I press my mouth to the bullet scar. He inhales---a sharp, caught sound.
His hand finds my hair. He pulls my head back. The tug is firm, controlled, the exact pressure that sends a wire of heat from my scalp to the base of my spine. My throat is exposed. He studies it the way he studies paintings---the line, the composition, the vulnerability on display.
Then his mouth descends. His lips trace the line of my throat. His tongue finds the hollow at the base where my pulse hammers, and he stays there---tasting it, measuring it, reading my heart rate with his mouth the way he read it with his thumb at the club.
I am shaking. The tremor runs through my entire body, and I cannot control it, and I don't want to.
His hands move to my belt. The buckle opens.
The zip. His fingers are efficient, unhurried, the same deliberate precision he brings to everything, and when his hand wraps around my cock the sound I make bounces off the studio walls and comes back to me as a sound I don't recognise.
He strokes me once. Slow. A single, devastating pull that makes my hips jerk off the table. Then he stops. His hand holds me---firm, still, the grip absolute---and he waits.
"Look at me."
I open my eyes. I didn't know I'd closed them.
His face is close, and for the first time since I have known him, the mask is gone.
The grey eyes are open---dark, dilated, burning with something that has clawed its way up from a depth he has spent decades burying.
He is looking at me the way I look at a painting that has stopped me in my tracks---with the devastated recognition that the thing in front of him is going to change what he knows about beauty.
"Kazimir." His name in my mouth feels like prayer in a language I'm learning.
He drops to his knees.
Kazimir Volkov. The Ghost. The man who built an empire and survived a betrayal and controls a consortium of killers from a penthouse in Kensington.
On his knees on a paint-stained concrete floor, between my thighs, and his mouth closes over my cock with a focus that erases every thought I have ever had.
I make a sound that is profanity and worship in equal measure.
My hand finds his hair---the silver at the temple, thick between my fingers.
His mouth is hot and relentless, his technique the same as his everything---methodical, designed to take me to the edge and hold me there with absolute authority.
His other hand grips my thigh hard enough to leave marks I will find in the morning, purple fingerprints on my inner thigh like pigment pressed into canvas.
He pulls off. I gasp at the loss---cold air where heat was, absence where presence was. He stands. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and the gesture is so human, so far from the performance of control, that it undoes something in me that was still holding.
"Turn around."
I slide off the table. I turn. I brace my hands on the worktable, and the spilled lapis is under my palms---blue, cold, mineral grit worth more than gold.
Behind me, I hear his belt. The clink of the buckle.
A drawer opening---he has put something in the worktable drawer, because this man plans for everything, and the realisation that he planned for this makes my breath hitch.