Chapter 16
Auralia
T he acrylic paint was drying on my fingers in that way that felt like a second skin—thick and satisfying, the kind of mess I used to apologize for before I learned that mess could be beautiful.
The nursery floor was cool through my leggings.
Afternoon light filtered through the lavender curtains, making everything soft and golden, and Maya sat cross-legged beside me in an oversized shirt that might have been Konstantin's once.
Mine was definitely Maks's—charcoal grey, smelling faintly of his cologne.
I'd stopped pretending I wasn't stealing his clothes. He'd stopped pretending he minded.
"Like this?" Maya held up her brush, loaded with orange that had somehow become brown.
"You're mixing too much." I leaned over, guided her hand toward the palette. "See how the yellow gets muddy when you drag it through the red? You want them to blend on the canvas, not the palette. Let the colors talk to each other there."
She nodded seriously, like I was explaining surgical technique instead of basic color theory. Then she applied her brush to the canvas and immediately created another brown blob.
"I think I'm hopeless," she announced.
"You're not hopeless. You're learning."
"I'm hopeless and I'm having fun." She grinned at me, her dark hair escaping from its bun, a streak of cadmium yellow on her cheekbone. "That's allowed, right?"
I loved her for that. Maya didn't need to be good at painting. She was already brilliant at a hundred other things. She could afford to be terrible at this one and laugh about it.
Her sunset looked like a crime scene. She didn't care.
"It's absolutely allowed," I said.
This had become our ritual. Wednesdays in the nursery, painting together while Sophie read in the corner or Katerina napped in a portable crib.
The weighted blanket would come out eventually.
The coloring books. The softness of being small together, being allowed to be small together, in a house where men with guns walked the perimeter and the world outside had teeth.
I was painting something abstract. Swirls of rose and gold that didn't mean anything except that they felt right.
The kind of art I'd never let anyone see before—no technique, no purpose, just color responding to mood.
Maks called it beautiful when he'd found me working on it yesterday. I'd almost believed him.
Things were good.
The thought still surprised me when it surfaced.
Good wasn't a state I'd ever expected to inhabit permanently.
Good was temporary, borrowed, something that would be snatched away the moment I stopped bracing for impact.
But days kept passing, and good kept staying, and slowly—terrifyingly—I was starting to trust it.
Maks and I had found our rhythm. Mornings where he dressed me in clothes that felt like armor made of cashmere.
Nights where he took me apart with his hands and his voice and put me back together with praise that landed somewhere I hadn't known was empty.
The collar sat against my throat now like it had always been there, a weight I'd forget about until I moved and felt the leather shift against my pulse.
The authentication work helped too. Three more pieces flagged in the last week alone—suspicious provenance, inconsistent brushwork, the tells that screamed forgery when you knew what to look for.
Each one another thread in the case against Anton Belyaev.
Each one proof that my strange, obsessive brain was useful for something more than spiraling.
I was building something. A life. A purpose. A place where I fit.
Even my website was getting traffic now.
The portrait of Maks—the one from our studio session, the one that showed him soft and warm and nothing like the Fox—had generated actual comments.
Other artists, mostly. People I didn't know, calling my work "evocative" and "intimate" and other words that made my chest tight with something that might have been pride.
I'd almost deleted it three times. Kept it up anyway.
"You're smiling," Maya observed. "That smile. The one that means you're thinking about him."
"I'm not—" I started, and then laughed, because of course I was. "Fine. Maybe a little."
"It's disgusting. In the best way." She set down her brush and stretched, her spine cracking audibly. "Kostya and I were like that in the beginning. Couldn't think about anything else. Now I think about other things sometimes. Usually still him, though."
The warmth in her voice when she talked about Konstantin was its own kind of art. Luminous. That was the word. The way love could light someone up from the inside.
I wondered if I looked like that too.
My phone buzzed against the carpet.
I almost ignored it. The Little space was too comfortable, the paint too satisfying between my fingers, the afternoon too perfect to interrupt with whatever the outside world wanted.
Probably a text from Maks checking in. Or a notification from the forum, someone responding to my post about identifying synthetic aging in forged documents.
But my eyes caught the preview anyway.
"Gallery representation inquiry."
My heart stopped.
Actually stopped—or felt like it did. That arrest of the organ, the suspension of everything, while my brain tried to process words that didn't make sense together. Gallery. Representation. Inquiry.
Someone was asking about representing me.
Someone who didn't know me. Someone who had just . . . found me.
"Auralia?" Maya's voice came from far away. "You okay? You just went white."
I couldn't answer. Couldn't move. Could only stare at the notification preview like it might disappear if I blinked, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less impossible.
Gallery representation inquiry.
My hands were shaking. My thumb hovered over the notification. Paint smeared across the screen—cadmium yellow, the ghost of Maya's sunset—and I should have wiped it first, should have been careful, but my hands wouldn't listen.
"Auralia?" Maya's voice was sharper now. Concerned. "What is it?"
I opened the email.
The words swam for a moment, my brain too full of static to process them. Then they sharpened. Focused. Became individual letters and sentences that meant something real.
Dear Ms. Hart,
My name is Elena Voss, and I represent the Voss-Laurent Gallery in Chelsea. We specialize in emerging artists with distinctive voices and emotionally resonant work.
I recently discovered your portfolio through your website and was immediately struck by your portrait work—particularly the piece you titled "Lis.
" The intimacy of the brushwork, the way you've captured not just likeness but essence, is extraordinary.
Your use of light is luminous. Your emotional depth is arresting.
I believe you have something special. Something that deserves to be seen.
I would very much like to meet with you to discuss potential representation and, if our conversation goes well, the possibility of a solo exhibition in our spring collection.
Please respond at your earliest convenience. I look forward to hearing from you.
Warmest regards,
Elena Voss
The words blurred.
Not from confusion this time. From tears. They were spilling down my cheeks before I could stop them, hot and sudden, painting tracks through whatever remained of the morning's careful composure.
Someone had seen my work. Someone real, someone professional, someone who looked at art for a living and knew what mattered.
She'd called me luminous. Emotionally arresting.
She'd looked at the portrait of Maks—the one I'd almost deleted three times, the one that showed too much of how I felt about him—and she'd seen something worth showing to the world.
"Auralia." Maya's hand found my shoulder. Warm. Grounding. "Talk to me. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." My voice cracked. Broke open. "Nothing's wrong, Maya. Something's—I think something's right."
She leaned in, reading over my shoulder. I watched her expression shift—confusion to understanding to something that looked like joy reflected back at me.
"Holy shit," she breathed. "A gallery? Auralia, this is—"
"I know."
"A solo show? In Chelsea?"
"I know."
"This is your dream."
The word hit me somewhere vital. Dream. Such a simple word for something so enormous.
For the thing I'd wanted since I was four years old, sitting on my grandmother's kitchen floor with crayons too thick for my small hands, making marks on paper that she called beautiful even when they were just scribbles.
For years, I'd hidden. Made my art in private, showed it to no one, convinced myself that wanting recognition was ego and ambition was delusion.
The website had been a moment of weakness.
A tiny rebellion against my own cowardice, posting paintings into the void without any real hope that anyone would care.
But someone had cared.
Someone named Elena Voss, who worked at a real gallery, who looked at the portrait I'd painted of the man I loved and saw something luminous.
Something worth showing to the world.
"She thinks I'm good enough," I whispered. The words tasted foreign in my mouth. Impossible. "She actually thinks I'm good enough."
Maya's arms wrapped around me. Tight, immediate, the embrace of someone who understood what this meant without needing explanation.
Her own path had been different—medicine instead of art, competence weaponized and then stripped away—but she knew what it felt like to be told you weren't enough.
And she knew what it felt like to find someone who saw you differently.
"Of course you're good enough," she said against my hair. "We've all known that. Now someone outside knows it too."
The tears kept coming. I couldn't stop them—didn't want to stop them. They felt cleansing. Like something old and wounded was finally being washed away.