Chapter 4 #2
Ptichka: That's the problem. I don't know what my instincts are saying because the whole day was a disaster.
I had to meet him at this gallery in Chelsea—I hate gallery spaces, all that white and silence and people looking at you—and I managed to hold it together for maybe twenty minutes and then I literally FELL INTO HIS ARMS, Daddy.
Like some kind of Victorian heroine with the vapours.
I caught my heel on a display platform and he caught me and I was pressed against his chest and I could smell his cologne and I just .
. . I ran away. I said I was sorry and I ran away.
He probably thinks I'm completely insane.
The receptionist definitely thinks I'm completely insane.
I can't even think about the job offer because every time I try, I just remember how mortifying the whole thing was.
I read the message.
Read it again.
A third time, slower, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense.
Gallery in Chelsea. Display platform. Fell into his arms. Could smell his cologne.
The details were too specific. Too precise. Too exactly what had happened this afternoon in the viewing room at the Vasiliev Gallery, when Auralia Hart had stumbled backward and I'd caught her elbow and pulled her against my chest and felt her heart hammering through the silk of her blouse.
My hands had gone cold.
It's not possible, I thought. It can't be possible.
But even as the denial formed, my brain was already running the calculations. Already seeing the pattern I'd somehow missed for five months. The details I'd catalogued about Ptichka without ever connecting them to the woman I'd met today.
She worked in authentication. Auralia was an authenticator.
She had sensory sensitivities. Auralia had fled the gallery like the lights were physically hurting her.
She had a greyhound. A grey greyhound with white markings, she'd told me once. Built like a living sculpture. Anxious around everyone except me.
Auralia Hart had a rescue greyhound. The interview had mentioned it specifically.
My hands were shaking as I minimized Discord and opened a new window.
The intelligence files I'd been building for weeks.
The authentication trail I'd assembled on Anton Belyaev's art network.
I'd been looking at galleries, at auction houses, at the particular experts whose names kept appearing on provenance documents for suspicious pieces.
I pulled up the list.
Cross-referenced.
Searched.
There.
A. Hart. Independent authenticator. Brooklyn-based.
Consulted on three pieces that had passed through galleries now flagged as potential laundering fronts.
Not the primary authenticator on any of them—she'd been brought in for secondary verification, which meant her name appeared in smaller print, easier to miss.
I'd seen it before. I'd seen it three times in the past month of research, and I hadn't connected it to anything because Hart was a common name and I hadn't been looking for her.
I hadn't known I needed to.
My chest felt hollow. Like someone had reached in and scooped out everything vital, leaving only the cold machinery of cognition.
Ptichka was Auralia.
Auralia was Ptichka.
The woman I'd been falling for online—the woman who called me Daddy and trusted me with her fears and made me feel more alive than anything else in my carefully controlled life—was the same person who'd looked up at me this afternoon with wide, overwhelmed eyes.
The same person who'd analyzed the Kandinsky with such fierce intelligence.
The same person whose face I'd been painting from memory for hours, chasing the ghost of her.
The Discord notification chimed. Another message from her.
I didn't look at it.
Instead, I sat back from my desk and stared at the wall, at the painting drying on its easel, at the face of the woman I now knew in two completely different ways.
I needed to think. I needed to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with this information.
The notification chimed again.
She was worried. I could feel it through the screen—the anxiety spiraling, the fear that she'd said too much, revealed too much, driven me away with the intensity of her disclosure.
I should answer her. Should reassure her. Should play the role of Lis and pretend nothing had changed.
But everything had changed. Everything had shifted beneath my feet, and I didn't know which way was up anymore.
A message blinked at me.
Ptichka: Did I say something wrong? You went quiet.
I looked at it and felt something crack in my chest.
She was worried she'd upset me. She was always worried about that—always bracing for rejection, always searching for evidence that she'd been too much, too intense, too demanding.
She'd told me once, during a particularly raw conversation at 2am, that she'd spent her whole life being left by people who'd promised to stay.
That she'd learned to expect abandonment the way other people expected sunrises.
I knew this about her. Knew it as Lis, from five months of careful conversations where she'd let me see the wounds underneath her armor.
Knew it now as Maksim, from the way she'd fled the gallery like I might chase her, like staying long enough to let someone be kind was more dangerous than running.
The doubled knowledge felt like holding something fragile and precious and impossibly heavy.
I couldn't tell her.
The realization settled over me with the weight of certainty.
I couldn't reveal who I was. Couldn't admit that I'd pieced together her identity from details she'd shared in confidence.
She hadn't consented to any of this—hadn't chosen to show me her face, her name, her address.
She'd shared pieces of herself with Lis because she trusted Lis to respect the boundaries that kept her safe.
Those boundaries existed for a reason. The community had rules about this—strict, unambiguous rules that existed precisely because people like me, with skills like mine, could destroy someone's sense of safety with a few hours of determined research.
I'd never violated those rules before. I wasn't going to start now.
Using her accidental disclosure to advance our relationship—either professionally or romantically—would be a betrayal of everything the community stood for.
Everything I stood for. It didn't matter that I wanted her.
It didn't matter that the wanting was becoming a physical ache, constant and inescapable.
She had to choose to show herself, or it meant nothing.
And beyond the ethics, there was the danger.
Anton's people were watching the art network.
They had to be—it was their pipeline, their system for moving money through seemingly legitimate channels.
Anyone who touched that system became a potential liability.
Anyone who asked the wrong questions, noticed the wrong inconsistencies, raised the wrong concerns.
Auralia had touched that system. Three times that I knew of.
Her name was in files. Her address was in records.
If I suddenly got close to her—if the Besharov family's intelligence officer started spending time with the authenticator who'd verified suspicious pieces—it would look like exactly what it was: someone investigating the network.
And if Anton's people noticed that investigation, they wouldn't target me. They'd target her.
The soft target. The vulnerable one. The woman who lived alone in a converted rope factory with her anxious rescue dog and no idea that she was standing in the middle of a battlefield.
I typed a response.
Lis: Sorry, little bird. Got distracted by work. You didn't do anything wrong. You could never.
The lie tasted like ash. But it was the kindest lie I could tell—the one that would stop her spiraling, stop the anxiety from eating her alive tonight. Tomorrow I would figure out the rest. Tonight, I could at least give her that.
I sent the message and closed Discord.
Then I opened a new file.
The work stretched out before me like a map of a hostile country.
I needed to trace the contamination—identify exactly which pieces she'd authenticated, which galleries had employed her, whether any of Anton's people knew her name.
I needed to understand the scope of the danger before I could begin to neutralize it.
I needed to keep her close. Professionally.
Carefully. With boundaries clear enough to protect both of us.
The job offer I'd made as Maksim was still on the table.
If she accepted, I could bring her into my orbit legitimately—give her work that would explain our contact, let me monitor any threats without revealing why.
But I couldn't push. Couldn't manipulate. Couldn't use Lis's influence to guide her toward a decision that served my purposes.
She had to choose. And if she chose to walk away—from the job, from me, from all of it—I would have to let her go.
I would have to protect her anyway, from a distance, without her ever knowing why.
The thought was unbearable. I let myself feel it for exactly three seconds—the full weight of what I was giving up, the relationship I couldn't pursue, the woman I couldn't have—and then I put it away.
The painting watched me from its easel.
Auralia's face, half-formed, emerging from shadow. The angle of her jaw. The intelligence in her eyes. All the details I'd been chasing for hours, trying to capture something that couldn't be captured—the particular quality of her presence, the way she'd looked at me when she forgot to be afraid.
I crossed to the easel and let myself look at her. Really look.
One moment. I allowed myself one moment of pure, aching want.
The dream of a different world where I wasn't who I was and she wasn't in danger and the only thing standing between us was the normal awkwardness of two people learning each other's shapes.
A world where I could walk into her studio and tell her the truth and watch her face when she realized that the man she'd been calling Daddy and the man who'd caught her in the gallery were one and the same.
That world didn't exist. Probably never would.
I pulled a cloth over the canvas.
The Fox had work to do.