Maksim (Underworld Daddies #6)

Chapter 1

Auralia

T he painting stared back at me from the examination table, judging me as I judged it.

Sixteen feet of converted rope factory stretched above my head, exposed brick and industrial windows that let in the north light—the only kind worth working under if you want to see true color.

I'd lived in this DUMBO studio for ten years, bought it when the neighbourhood still had edge and character as well as occasional gunshots.

Now I had artisanal coffee shops for neighbours, but at least the light hadn't changed.

I adjusted my loupe and leaned closer.

The alleged Repin was magnificent. Even without authentication, without the provenance documents sitting in their manila folder on my desk, the painting commanded attention.

A peasant woman stood at the edge of a wheat field, her face turned toward something beyond the canvas—the viewer could never know what she saw, only that it moved her.

The brushwork was confident, alive. Each stroke existed exactly where it needed to be.

It was precise and perfect. Just like my new client.

He called himself Victor Harmon. I'd never met him, of course.

We communicated through encrypted email and he paid in wire transfers, always on time, always the exact amount we'd agreed upon.

He claimed the painting had been hidden in a private collection in St. Petersburg for decades, brought to America by a family fleeing the chaos of the post-Soviet years.

It was a plausible story. I'd heard dozens of variations on it.

The provenance documentation was immaculate.

Too immaculate.

I pushed back from the table and let my eyes rest. The studio smelled of linseed oil and turpentine and old brick, scents that had seeped into my skin years ago and would probably follow me to the grave.

Pigment samples lined the shelves in labelled glass vials, organized by manufacturer and date of production.

My spectrophotometer sat on its dedicated workstation, the one piece of equipment I'd saved three years to afford.

Reference books rose in tottering stacks against the walls, organized in a system only I understood.

Everything in its place. Everything making sense.

I returned to the painting.

The thing about forgers—the good ones, anyway—is that they understand art better than most legitimate artists.

They study obsessively. They learn to see the way the masters saw, to move their hands the way dead geniuses moved theirs.

The best forgeries aren't copies; they're love letters written in someone else's handwriting.

This painting wasn't a forgery.

I was almost certain of it. The craquelure—the fine network of cracks that develops in old paint over decades—followed the right patterns.

The canvas showed appropriate age. The pigments, from my preliminary analysis, were consistent with what Repin would have used in the 1880s.

The stretcher bars were old, worn, carried the ghost impressions of previous frames.

But the paperwork . . . something about the paperwork gave me pause.

I pulled the folder toward me and flipped it open again. Export permits, customs declarations, letters of authenticity from two separate Russian institutions, photographs from what appeared to be archival collections. Everything dated correctly, aged appropriately, stamped and signed and notarized.

Everything a little too perfect.

Real provenance documents accumulate over time like sediment.

They bear coffee stains from careless archivists.

They reference other documents that may or may not survive.

They contain typos, contradictions, gaps that later scholars try to explain.

They're messy because life is messy, because history is messy, because the journey of any artwork through time is a chaotic tumble through changing hands and evolving markets and the occasional war.

Victor Harmon's documentation read like a forger's love letter to due diligence.

I reached for my UV torch.

Ultraviolet light reveals what the naked eye cannot. Old varnish fluoresces differently than new varnish. Retouched areas glow. Conservation efforts leave their signatures. I'd spent years learning to read these invisible stories, and the painting was about to tell me another one.

The beam swept across the surface.

I frowned.

The varnish layer fluoresced wrong. Too even, too consistent across the entire surface.

Natural varnish accumulation happens in stages—a painting is varnished by its creator, then re- varnished by conservators over the following centuries, each application leaving its own fluorescent signature.

This looked like a single application, carefully aged to appear old.

Not the painting. The varnish.

Someone had stripped and re-varnished this work within the last twenty years. Not necessarily a red flag—conservation efforts often required it. But combined with the too-perfect provenance . . .

I photographed the anomaly. Three angles, varying exposure settings. The images joined the others in my digital archive, dated and tagged and backed up to three separate locations.

I opened my notebook.

My records were meticulous. Obsessive, some might say, though I preferred "thorough.

" Every observation, every test, every measurement went into the leather-bound journals I'd kept since I started this work.

Digital backups existed, of course, but I trusted paper in a way I didn't trust screens.

Paper couldn't be hacked or corrupted. Paper was permanent. It had a patina.

Varnish fluorescence indicates single application, est. 10-20 years. Inconsistent with documented provenance claiming continuous family ownership since 1912. Recommend further analysis.

I set down my pen and stared at the peasant woman in her wheat field.

The painting was almost certainly genuine. A lost Repin, hidden from the world for over a century, finally coming to light. It would be worth millions at auction. Victor Harmon would be very pleased.

The paperwork was almost certainly not.

Someone had created an elaborate fiction to explain where this painting had been.

Why? If the painting was real, why fabricate its history?

Unless the real history contained something worse than mystery.

Unless the painting had been stolen, or looted, or passed through hands that couldn't bear scrutiny.

I should refuse the authentication. That was the ethical choice, the safe choice. Let Victor Harmon take his magnificent painting and his fabricated documents to someone else, someone less curious, someone who would accept the story and sign off on the sale.

But I couldn't stop looking at the peasant woman's face. The way Repin had captured that moment of private revelation. The way the light fell across her weathered skin.

Somewhere, this painting had a real story. And I wanted to know what it was.

Time to dig.

*

Three hours of digging later, my hands were trembling. The kind of tremor I couldn't control, couldn't hide, couldn't think my way through.

I'd been hyperfocusing—that blessing and curse of a brain that couldn't do anything halfway—and the world had continued without me.

I hadn't eaten. I hadn't drunk anything.

The water bottle on my desk sat exactly where I'd placed it that morning, still full, still room temperature, still completely forgotten.

The afternoon light had shifted while I wasn't paying attention, and now it was hitting me directly through the western windows—too bright, too warm, an assault that my morning self should have anticipated and prepared for.

I should have closed the blinds hours ago. I should have set an alarm to remind myself to eat. I should have done a hundred small things that kept the overwhelm at bay, and I'd done none of them because the painting and it’s history had consumed me completely.

What if I made a mistake? What if I saw forgery and deception where there was only authenticity? What if I cost my client millions of dollars?

The city noise crescendoed.

It started with a car alarm—that two-tone shriek that drills directly into the brainstem.

Then the construction from the new development two blocks over, a rhythmic pounding that I'd been filtering out all morning but couldn't filter anymore.

Someone's bass-heavy music thudded through the walls, not loud enough to complain about, just loud enough to vibrate in my chest cavity like a second heartbeat I hadn't asked for.

My neighbor's dog started barking. High, sharp, insistent.

A truck downshifted on the street below.

Someone honked their horn, held it for three seconds too long.

A siren wailed in the distance, growing closer.

It all hit at once, the way it always did. Every sound equally loud, equally urgent, equally demanding my attention. My brain couldn't sort them anymore, couldn't decide which to filter and which to focus on. Everything became foreground. Everything screamed.

My vision narrowed. The studio collapsed around me until I could only see the painting directly in front of me, but even that was wrong—the colors too saturated, the details too sharp, the peasant woman's face suddenly accusatory.

You forgot to take care of yourself again. You always forget.

My chest tightened. That familiar band of pressure wrapping around my ribs, squeezing until each breath became a conscious effort. My heart pounded too fast, adding its rhythm to the chaos of sounds already assaulting me.

I gripped the edge of my worktable. The wood was solid, real, something to anchor myself to. I tried to count my breaths the way I'd been taught.

One. Two. Three—

A door slammed somewhere in the building.

The numbers scattered like startled birds.