Chapter 4
Maksim
I should have been sleeping. A sane person would be sleeping.
Obviously, I was not sane.
No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was painting her.
Manhattan glittered through my apartment windows, all those lights belonging to people who were probably doing sensible things like dreaming or fucking or at least not obsessing over a woman they'd met for twenty minutes.
I'd turned my easel away from the view. Couldn't paint the city tonight. Couldn't paint anything except the angle of her jaw when she'd turned to examine the Kandinsky, the way gallery light had caught the edge of her cheekbone and made her look like something Vermeer might have imagined.
I mixed burnt sienna into my shadow tones, working from memory, which was dangerous. Memory was already editing her into something luminous, softening the anxiety in her shoulders, smoothing the rawness around her eyes. She'd been luminous enough in person. She didn't need my help.
Auralia Hart. Even her name felt like something I shouldn't be holding too closely.
The brush moved across the canvas in small strokes, building the warmth of her skin tone.
She'd been pale under that terrible gallery lighting—everyone looked like a corpse under those LEDs—but there'd been warmth underneath.
I'd felt it when she fell against me. Just for a second.
The heat of her through her blazer, the frantic rabbit-quick of her heartbeat against my chest before she'd pulled away like I'd burned her.
It wasn’t a portrait. I didn't have the arrogance to attempt that, not from a single meeting, not from the fractured impressions that were all I had to work with.
What I was painting was something softer and more dangerous: the angle of her jaw when she'd turned to examine the Kandinsky, forgetting for a moment to be afraid.
The way the gallery's terrible lighting had fallen across her cheekbone, washing her out in places while making her glow in others.
The exact set of her shoulders when she'd straightened after delivering her verdict on the painting—confident, certain, inhabiting her expertise like armor.
She'd been magnificent in that moment. Completely herself.
I loaded my palette knife with burnt sienna and dragged it through the shadow tones I'd built up along her jaw.
The warmth wasn't right yet. Her skin had been pale—too pale, I suspected, from too many hours indoors with her UV torches and her spectrophotometers—but there'd been warmth underneath.
A flush that rose when she got excited about brushwork, when she forgot to be self-conscious and let her brain run free.
Memory was a dangerous thing. I knew this.
I'd spent years learning to distrust my own recollections, to verify everything twice, to assume that what I remembered was already being edited by what I wanted to believe.
Memory made liars of everyone. Made saints of the dead and monsters of the living and angels of beautiful women who'd stumbled into your arms for three seconds before fleeing like you'd burned her.
But I couldn't stop seeing her face.
The ring. I needed to capture the ring somehow—that thin gold band she'd twisted compulsively while she talked, turning it around and around her finger like a rosary.
She'd touched it constantly, grounding herself, and I'd watched her fingers move and thought about what they would look like wrapped around a paintbrush. Around a pen. Around—
I set down the palette knife. Pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness.
This was wrong. This was so profoundly wrong that I should have been ashamed, and I was ashamed, but the shame wasn't stopping anything.
I was supposed to be thinking about Ptichka.
My little bird. My sweet girl. The woman I'd been falling for across five months of careful conversation, whose real name I didn't know, whose face I'd never seen, whose voice I'd never heard.
She'd called me Daddy two nights ago and something in my chest had cracked open and I'd thought: This is it.
This is what I've been waiting for. This is the person I want to take care of forever.
And now I was standing in my studio at one in the morning, painting another woman's face from memory, and the guilt was a living thing in my stomach.
What kind of man did this? What kind of Daddy let his attention wander like a stray dog, chasing every interesting scent?
I'd built my identity around patience. Around care.
Around the particular discipline of waiting for someone to trust you, of earning that trust inch by careful inch, of never pushing, never demanding, never taking what wasn't freely offered.
Ptichka trusted me. She'd handed me pieces of herself I suspected she'd never shown anyone—her anxiety, her meltdowns, her desperate need for structure and safety and someone to tell her she was doing okay.
She'd let me see behind her walls because I'd promised not to hurt her with what I found there.
And here I was, thinking about someone else's eyes.
I opened my own eyes and looked at the canvas.
Auralia stared back at me. Half-formed, emerging from shadow like a figure in a Rembrandt.
I hadn't captured her yet—might never capture her, not really—but there was something there.
The intelligence in her gaze. The wariness.
The way she'd looked at me when I caught her, like she couldn't decide whether I was safe or the most dangerous thing she'd ever encountered.
Both, probably. I was both.
I should message Ptichka. She'd be worried about my silence—I always messaged her in the evenings, always checked in, always asked my careful questions about water and food and sleep.
The routine mattered to her. The predictability.
Missing it without explanation would send her spiraling into anxiety about what she'd done wrong, whether she'd upset me, whether I was already pulling away.
I should put down the brush and close the paint tubes and cover the canvas with a cloth and pretend this had never happened. Should focus on the work that actually mattered—Anton Belyaev's money trail, the galleries I needed to investigate, the war that was coming whether I was ready for it or not.
I should figure out what the hell was wrong with me. Run a diagnostic on my own heart the way I ran diagnostics on surveillance systems, identify the malfunction, patch the vulnerability, restore normal operations.
I did none of these things.
I picked up the brush again. Mixed titanium white with a touch of phthalo green, chasing the exact shade of grey her eyes had become when the fear receded and the thinking took over. The color that had made me feel, for one vertiginous moment, like she could see straight through me.
The ghost of her watched me work.
I chased it until the light changed.
T he green dot appeared at 11:47pm, and my chest did that thing it always did—that lift, that warmth, that sense of the world settling into its proper configuration. Then the guilt hit, and I wanted to put my fist through the canvas still drying on my easel.
I minimized the browser window I'd been working in.
Screenshots from Auralia Hart's sparse online presence—a professional headshot, a conference photo, the interview that mentioned her north-facing light and her rescue greyhound.
I'd been collecting them for the past hour, telling myself it was research for the job, knowing it was something else entirely. Something I hated myself for.
Discord opened. The server icon glowed with her presence.
Her message arrived before I could compose one.
Ptichka: Can I ask you something? I need advice and I don't know who else to trust.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She trusts me. The thought was a blade, cutting both ways.
Lis: Always, little bird. What's going on?
The typing indicator pulsed. Appeared. Disappeared.
Appeared again, stretching longer this time.
She was composing something careful, something she'd probably deleted and rewritten three times already.
That was her pattern when she was overwhelmed—she edited herself into knots, second-guessing every word.
Finally, the message came through.
Ptichka: I got a job offer today. A strange one. The money is incredible and he seemed legitimate, but I don't know anything about him and my instincts are all over the place. I can't tell if I'm scared because it's actually risky or scared because I's scared of everything.
I read it twice. Three times.
It was a coincidence. It had to be.
There was no way she could be Auralia.
I thought quickly and typed out a response, trying to keep things as anonymous as possible.
Lis: I can't advise you on this one, malyshka. I don't know enough about the situation, and more importantly, this has to be your choice. What I can tell you is that your instincts are usually good. What are they actually saying, underneath the fear?
I sent it before I could talk myself into something worse.
The typing indicator appeared again. She was thinking. Processing. Doing that thing her brain did where it ran seventeen analyses simultaneously and tangled itself into anxiety spirals.
I waited.
The seconds stretched. Became a minute. Two.
Finally, a message arrived.