Chapter 10
TEN
The first session began at dawn, and Skarreth understood within thirty seconds that he had made a catastrophic miscalculation.
He had imagined sitting for a portrait as a passive exercise.
Hold still. Maintain expression. Let the artist work.
He had endured interrogations, knife wounds, and seven years of performing a monster's role without breaking character.
Sitting in a chair while a woman held a brush—how difficult could that be?
He had not accounted for the way she would look at him.
Octavia circled him the way he circled prey in beast form—slow, calculated, mapping weakness.
She held a stick of charcoal in her right hand, but hadn't touched it to paper yet.
She just moved. Around and around, her bare feet silent on the studio's stone floor, those dark brown eyes stripping him in a way that made his skin prickle beneath his silk shirt.
She studied his hairline. The ridge of his brow. The place where his jaw met his neck. She leaned closer to examine the texture of his skin—close enough that he could count the individual, curled plaits of hair framing her face—and then pulled back without a word and circled to his other side.
He was the predator. He was Lord Skarreth, the monster who hunted his own slaves for sport. He had made hardened slavers flinch with a glance.
This woman walked around him as if he were a still life arrangement she hadn't decided how to frame.
"Your skin doesn't reflect light the way I expected," she said, more to herself than to him. She was behind him now. He felt her gaze on the back of his neck. "It absorbs it. The highlights will need to come from the environment, not from the surface."
She appeared on his left. Stopped. Her head tilted. The charcoal rolled between her fingers—an unconscious gesture, the same way he turned a blade.
"How many slaves do you own?"
No preamble, no windup. She asked it the way she might ask about the weather, her eyes never leaving the junction of his cheekbone and temple.
He kept his expression carved from granite. "Currently? Two. My previous acquisitions number two-hundred-forty-seven over the past seven years."
She absorbed this without visible reaction. The charcoal touched paper for the first time—a single decisive stroke.
"And the previous two-hundred-forty-seven. Where are they now?"
"They served their purpose."
More strokes. Quick, confident. She wasn't looking at the paper. She was looking at him.
"Served their purpose," she repeated. Flat. "That's a nice way to say it."
She moved to his right side. He kept his gaze fixed on the point she'd indicated earlier, a knot in the wooden beam across the studio, and did not turn his head.
Her footsteps moved in a slow arc. She stopped directly in front of him and looked at his face with an intensity that made something behind his ribs contract.
"Did they all get silk sheets, or am I special?"
The blade of her words went in sideways, between the ribs of his cover. He let it sit there. Absorbed it. His face gave nothing away.
"You're a commissioned piece of high value. Your comfort serves the work."
"A commissioned piece." The charcoal moved. "Is that what you call it?"
"I call things what they are."
Her mouth tightened—a hairline fracture in her composure. She stepped back, surveyed whatever she'd sketched, and turned the pad so he couldn't see it.
"Tilt your chin up."
He obeyed. The northern light caught his jaw, his throat, the underside of his brow.
"More. I need the light to hit your fangs."
He parted his lips enough to let the light find them. Two curved points, ivory against obsidian. Weapons. The things that made children scream in the holding pens before he could get them to safety. The things that made his cover work precisely because they made him look like what everyone feared.
Octavia studied them the way she studied everything: without flinching.
"Your buyers probably love those."
Something in his chest folded in on itself. He held the pose. His voice remained cultured ice: "They serve a practical function. Intimidation has commercial value."
"I bet it does."
She drew and the charcoal hissed against the paper, stroke after stroke, building something he couldn't see.
Her eyes moved between his face and the page in a rhythm that hypnotized—look, translate, mark; look, translate, mark—her concentration so total that the air in the studio seemed to thin around her.
He sat with the stillness of prey in a predator’s sights.
The irony was a barb hooked into the roof of his mouth: the monster, held captive by an artist's gaze.
The hunter, pinned like a specimen. Every slaver from here to the Kael-Voss corridor would laugh themselves sick if they could see Lord Skarreth sitting obediently while a human woman he purchased told him where to put his chin.
But they would not laugh at her eyes. Nobody would laugh at the way Octavia Tate looked at a subject she intended to paint.
It was the most thorough dissection he had ever been subjected to, and she hadn't touched him.
Every glance opened something. Every pass of those dark brown eyes peeled back a layer he thought he'd sealed shut.
She hadn't even started the real work yet—this was preliminary, gestural, the equivalent of clearing her throat—and already he felt flayed.
He answered her questions with the cold precision his cover demanded: "Health. Temperament. Rarity. Humans are uncommon in this sector—they command a premium. Artistic ability adds novelty value."
Every word scraped his throat raw. He tracked her responses to each clinical term: the set of her jaw at temperament, the stillness of her hand at novelty value, the single hard blink at premium that she probably didn't know he caught.
She absorbed it all behind those dark eyes and fed it into the charcoal, and the portrait taking shape on her page was—
He caught a glimpse when she shifted her weight. Just a flash of the emerging image, upside-down and incomplete.
Shadow and menace. A face built from darkness, lit by two pale eyes that held nothing warm. The fangs prominent. The jaw predatory. The brow a cliff edge over the ice-blue gleam that assessed and consumed and felt nothing at all.
It was technically brilliant. The proportions exact, the values masterful even in rough charcoal. She'd captured the way his skin drank light and used it to deepen him into silhouette, so the eyes burned brighter by contrast—cold stars in a black sky.
She had drawn the monster.
The monster everyone saw. The mask he'd built over years of buying people and setting them free and watching the number climb—823 and counting—while the galaxy whispered his name like a curse.
She'd painted exactly what he'd asked her to paint. Truth.
This was her truth about him. The only version of him she had evidence for.
He wanted to put his fist through the paper.
"Hold that expression," she said, and he realized something had leaked through—some fracture in the granite—because her charcoal was moving faster now, chasing whatever had crossed his face. He locked it down. Rebuilt the mask. But she'd seen the crack, and the damage was on the page.
"We'll continue tomorrow," she said forty minutes later, not looking at him. "Same time. Same light."
He rose. The silk of his shirt whispered against skin that felt too tight. He left without speaking, and behind him he heard the rapid scratch of charcoal—she was still drawing, capturing what she'd seen in the last moments before he'd reassembled himself.
The second session was worse.
She needed his hands.
"The composition requires them," she said, all business, arranging a length of dark fabric across his lap. "They're part of the story. Hold them here—no, open. Like this."
She reached for his right hand.
Her fingers closed around his index finger and guided it into position. Her thumb pressed against his knuckles, and her palm rested against the pad of his finger where the claw retracted.
The scale was obscene. Her hand disappeared inside his. Her fingers, elegant and sure and stained with yesterday's charcoal, looked like a child's against the broad plane of his palm. Dark brown against blue-black, both of them creatures of shadow, and the contact point where her skin met his—
Electricity.
Not a metaphor. Not a figure of speech. Something detonated at the junction of their skin and ripped up his arm like a current through copper, through his shoulder, into the center of his chest where it discharged in a single concussive pulse that stopped his breath.
His lungs locked. His beast surged beneath his skin—not the predatory surge of the hunt but something older, a recognition that rang through his bones like a struck bell.
Her pulse leaped.
He heard it—the vein at her wrist, pressed against his finger, throbbing its sudden terror-or-something-else directly into his skin.
He smelled it—the spike in her blood, adrenaline and cortisol and beneath them, threaded through like gold wire in dark fabric, something hotter.
A scent that had nothing to do with fear.
She snatched her hand back.
The absence of contact burned worse than the contact itself.
She stepped away—two steps, three, four—and stood with her back half-turned, her breathing controlled in a way that told him the control was costing her.
The charcoal in her right hand trembled once before she stilled it through grip alone.
"Don't move."
Her voice came out rough. Scraped raw. She cleared her throat and didn't look at him.
"Keep your hands exactly like that. Don't move."
He did not move. He did not reach for her.
He did not inhale deeper to chase the layered heat of her scent—anger on the surface, sharp and metallic, and beneath it, still burning, that golden thread that had nothing to do with rage.
His beast pressed against his skin, not to hunt but to close the four steps of distance between them and press his face into the curve of her neck where that scent pooled at its strongest.
He did not move.
She painted.
For one hour, he sat motionless while Octavia Tate attacked the canvas with a focus so vicious it bordered on violence.
Her strokes were hard, definitive—no tentative marks, no soft blending.
She was building something with the same intensity she'd used to pick her cage's lock: determined, furious, refusing to let the material resist her.
He studied her. The paint smudge on her collarbone—cadmium yellow, transferred from the heel of her hand when she'd pushed her shirt aside.
The way her hair fell forward when she leaned into the canvas, obscuring her face.
The mechanics of her grip. A scar on her left wrist, exposed when her sleeve rode up, a thin silver line against her dark skin.
He cataloged all of it because cataloging was analysis, and analysis was control, and control was the only thing between him and the woman four steps away who had touched his hand for three seconds and left a charge still humming beneath his skin.
She didn't speak for the remaining hour. Neither did he.
When the light shifted past optimal, she set her brush down with a click against the palette's edge.
"We're done for today."
Dismissal. From a woman he owned. The word ‘owned’ sat in his stomach like swallowed glass.
He rose and walked to the door. He did not look at the canvas—he already knew what he'd see. More shadow. More mask. The hands she'd touched rendered in paint as weapons rather than what they'd been in that single charged moment: reaching.
"Tomorrow," he said. His voice held. Barely.
She didn't answer. He heard the brush resume before he cleared the doorway—she was painting from memory now, chasing the ghost of whatever had happened between their hands.
His quarters. Door locked. The shower's water was icy enough to shock breath back into his body. He stood beneath the cascade with his palms flat against the stone and let the temperature punish him back into coherence.
His hands were shaking.
He could still feel her. The specific pressure of her thumb against his knuckles.
The heat of her palm—so much heat from such a small surface.
The tremor that had passed from her fingers into his in the instant before she pulled away, that single vibration that told him everything her face had refused to.
Eight hundred and twenty-three people were freed.
Seven years of cover maintained without a single break.
A network that spanned twelve systems, built on the foundation of his performed monstrousness, dependent on every sentient being in the galaxy believing that Lord Skarreth was exactly what the charcoal portrait showed: the thing that assessed and consumed and felt nothing at all.
One woman. One infuriating, fearless, too-perceptive woman who looked at him like he was a surface she intended to strip bare, who touched his hand and made his beast howl, who painted him as a monster because that was all he'd shown her and who was right about every line she drew.
The cold water hammered his shoulders. His hands shook.
He would not think about the lightning. The point of contact. The way her fingers had curled around his, small and sure, and how the world had narrowed to a space no wider than the gap between two pulse points.
He refused.
The water ran colder, and his hands kept shaking, and the refusal held exactly the way a wall holds against a rising sea: completely, immovably, until the moment it doesn't.