Chapter 11
Kiryan
After dinner, I blindfolded Elena.
"What is this?" She brushed her fingers over the black silk scarf, confused, but she didn't pull it off.
"A surprise," I said.
I caught her hand before she could pull it back and led her upstairs.
The darkness stole her sense of direction, and she pressed close to me. With every step, her grip tightened. That kind of unguarded trust and dependence weighed heavy in my chest. And I... I liked it.
I took her to the far end of the south wing on the second floor.
It had used to be my mother's sunroom. A full wall of windows faced the garden, the best light in the whole house during the day.
After she died, I had the furniture cleared out. The door had stayed shut for years. Tonight, I walked back in with a woman's hand in mine.
I pushed the door open, flicked on the light, and only then untied the scarf from Elena's eyes.
"Don't open them yet." I covered her eyes with my palm. "The light is bright."
Her lashes swept my skin, a soft tickle. I waited two seconds, then slowly lifted my hand.
Elena opened her eyes and stopped in the doorway.
The room had been turned into a studio. A worktable.
Storage cabinets. Everything set up. Two easels stood in front of the windows, and one of them held that unfinished mother-and-child painting.
The rest of her pieces had been separated with moisture-proof paper and laid neatly on the table—no dust, not a speck.
There was enough here for her to start working right away, and enough empty space for her to make it her own.
Elena walked in with bright eyes. She touched the easel first, then slid open a cabinet. When she saw what was inside, her breath caught.
"These are my brushes and paints," she said.
"Obviously."
She turned and glared at me, but her eyes already shone wet. "I mean... you kept them safe."
I stepped in beside her and dropped a key into her palm.
"I set it up when I could these past few days. This is your studio now."
She stared down at the key for a long moment, silent.
"You don't like it?"
"Yeah, I do." She nodded, voice tight. "It is... too good. So good I don't even know what to say."
"Then don't." I tipped my chin toward the unfinished painting. "Try it. See if it works for you."
Elena pulled an old paint-splattered shirt over her dress, rolled up her sleeves, and went straight to the canvas. She mixed slate blue and warm gold, and her brush came alive.
I should've gone back to the study. I had plenty waiting on me. But I couldn't stop watching her.
She had her hazel hair twisted up messy at the back of her head. A smear of blue sat on her cheek, and she didn't even notice. When she worked, she looked focused—happy. Suddenly, all the trouble of turning this room over didn't feel like trouble at all.
It had sat empty for years. Maybe it had been waiting for her.
"You made the rain night feel cold," I said, watching the painting. "But that kid doesn't look scared at all."
On the canvas, the mother held her little girl. Outside the window there were no details, just slate blue against warm gold—rain-dark night and the safety of inside.
Cool tones took most of the space, but that small pocket of warmth hooked your eye and didn't let go.
"Because she knew her mother wouldn't let go," Elena said.
I looked at the child's small hand clutching her mother's clothes. "I figure that painting will make her feel like her mother is still there, even for a second."
I had plenty of art in the manor. Some pieces had pedigree, and some had price tags that could keep guests talking all night. None of them felt as real as what sat in front of me.
Elena's work might've lacked a name, but it didn't lack value. She was a painter—an actual one. Not the useless daughter Seamus called her. Not the attention-hungry little show-off Isabella had described.
Elena looked back at me, surprised.
"I didn't think you'd get it."
"I don't get painting."
"But you got what she wanted to leave behind."
I didn't answer. My mother had been gone for years, and I couldn't even remember the exact warmth of her last hug. But that canvas dragged me back to being small, when she'd held me close during a storm and made the thunder feel far away.
If someone had left me a painting like that, I would've paid any price to own it.
"You did good," I said.
Elena's mouth curved instantly.
Most of the time, she made herself smaller. When she painted, she didn't. She stood straight, laid down strokes without hesitation, the brush like it belonged to her body.
My gaze dropped to a sketchbook on the table. "Can I look?"
She froze.
Before, I wouldn't have asked. Anything inside my house, I'd assumed I had the right to see.
"You can," she said softly.
Inside were people everywhere—an old man selling flowers on a street corner, a couple fighting by a café window, and a series of nude studies.
When I flipped to the third nude, my finger stopped. A man sat there, naked, and the space between his legs was drawn with sharp, explicit clarity.
"Who is this?"
Elena leaned in, calm. "A figure model."
"How many times did you draw them?"
"That was basic training."
"I asked how many."
She glanced at me. "I don't remember."
"You don't remember how many times you stared at naked men?"
"I was studying anatomy. I wasn't staring at men."
The more she explained, the clearer the images got in my head.
Elena behind an easel, calmly looking over some stranger's bare body. Maybe she bit the end of her pencil when she didn't like a line. Maybe she stepped closer and used her fingers to check the direction of his muscles.
Unless he was dead, he wasn't staying unaffected by the way she looked at him. He would've seen her brows knit in thought, seen her tongue touch her lower lip without her noticing—then he would've sat there with that damn hunger while she studied him.
Heat flared in my chest.
"Don't draw them anymore." I snapped the sketchbook shut.
Elena didn't get angry. She just looked at me like I'd lost my mind.
"They are just models."
"Their bodies aren't worth your time."
"There isn't any 'worth it' or 'not worth it' with the human body. Everyone's bones, muscles, age, everything they've lived through—it all leaves different lines."
"Then you need better models."
Before she could even process it, I started unbuttoning my shirt. First button. Second. The brush slipped from her fingers and hit the floor.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"You said you need a figure model."
I pulled the shirt off and tossed it over the back of a chair. The scars crossing my chest showed under the light. This body had been wrecked by too many fights—nothing like those clean-skinned young models in her book.
If the scars ruined what she wanted to draw, then stripping like this was fucking stupid.
Elena's gaze tracked from my stomach to my chest. Her ears went red.
"You don't need to do this."
I didn't answer. I unbuckled my belt and bared the rest of me.
Her eyes slid down before she could stop them, then snapped back up to my face like she'd touched a hot stove. The blush on her cheeks deepened.
"Kiryan."
She said my name like a warning, but the little tremor at the end gave her away—shy, rattled.
"You said it is basic training." I sat down on the window bench.
She let out a breath, grabbed a charcoal pencil, and set her paper. She made a few measuring motions, but she didn't look at me once.
"Why aren't you looking?"
"I am thinking about composition."
Her mouth pressed tight. The charcoal scratched over the paper. After a moment, she finally glanced up.
"When you drew other men, did you stare between their legs this long?" I caught her gaze.
Her charcoal nearly snapped in half.
"If you talk less, I'd finish faster."
She slipped into that zone, charcoal moving quick. She stepped back half a pace to check the whole thing, tilted her head to read the light. Those bright, damp hazel eyes looked like honey set on fire as they swept my chest, my waist, my thighs.
She looked too focused. Every time her eyes passed, my skin felt like she'd actually touched me. Desire woke up fast. I didn't need to look down to know how hard I'd gotten.
"A professional model wouldn't react to the artist," Elena said first.
"That is the artist's problem."
"I didn't do anything."
"You looked me over with those wet eyes from head to toe and expected me not to react?"
Her breathing stopped.
I wanted to haul her out from behind the easel, make her use her hands, make her feel what she'd done to me. The thought tightened my gut. But she dropped her eyes again.
Light caught in her hair and lashes, and that open, unprotected way she threw herself into the work made me hesitate. I pinned the want down and stayed still the way she needed me to.
Forty minutes later, Elena set the charcoal aside.
"Done?" I asked.
"Just a rough draft."
I stood, dressed, and walked to her side.
The man on the page was built from clean charcoal lines. The double-headed eagle tattoo on his chest and the old wounds looked heavier in shadow. The darkest strokes sat in the eyes—hot, aggressive, like the want on paper had reached straight through the page to the person behind the easel.
She used a bent knee and shadow to handle what was between my legs, hiding the most obvious part of my reaction inside the composition. The whole thing carried a sharp, undeniable sense of art.
"You hid my cock pretty well," I said.
The tips of her ears went red again. "That part didn't affect the composition."
I didn't push it. "You did good."
Elena looked like she wasn't sure she'd heard me right.
"Your composition, your light—there is more life in it than most things I've seen," I said. "People are going to love your work. People are going to pay for it. You have the skill."
She lowered her eyes and brushed extra charcoal dust off the edge of the paper. "My father never thought so. He thought my paintings embarrassed him. To him, art had two uses—flatter whoever needed flattering, or sell high at auction."
"Rich idiots pay top dollar for garbage every day. That doesn't make it good. Your work isn't judged by Seamus."
She looked up and held my gaze a long time.
I opened the sketchbook again. Portraits filled most of it—nothing like the simple drills I'd assumed.
"I don't know art training," I said, tapping a page with my finger. "I thought painters did the same plaster busts over and over. Or vases. Or landscapes. Why do you keep drawing people?"
"Because landscapes end up on postcards, and expensive statues always have someone to take care of them." Elena lifted the finished mother-and-child painting. "But a lot of people's lives don't leave anything behind."
Her fingertip brushed the fine lines at the mother's eye.
"I want to paint calluses. Wrinkles. The curve of someone's back when they bow their head to get through the day.
I want to paint the split second when someone looks at someone else.
" Her voice stayed steady, but it carried something raw.
"Those moments might not be pretty, and they might not sell for the highest price.
But they prove someone lived for real. They existed. They loved—and they were loved."
My chest tightened, slow and hard.
That not-quite-perfect stew from tonight flashed through my mind. The light she'd left on, waiting for me to come home. Proof I'd been here. Proof I'd mattered. And the thought of losing it hit like a fist—I could already feel the ache of missing it.
"I really love painting," Elena said. "Not because it makes me somebody. Not because I want out from under the Rossi name. When I hold a brush, I just get to be me."
No woman playing games looked at the world like that.
I remembered what Isabella had used to say. Elena pretended she didn't fit in just to seem special. She painted to pull attention. That was the story Isabella had fed me.
I'd never checked it. Because Isabella was the woman I'd decided to marry, I treated her opinion like fact. Every time Elena went quiet, I called it hiding something. Every time she defended herself, I called it manipulation. Even her protecting her supplies—I'd taken it as a performance.
I'd hurt her in the exact way I despised.
My father had never listened to my mother. He'd decided she was weak and inconvenient. He'd believed a mistress's tears were more real than a wife's pain. After my mother died, I'd sworn I'd never become him.
And yet I was repeating his arrogance.
"I am sorry," I said, and the words scraped out of me. "I shouldn't have insulted your paintings. I shouldn't have had your things thrown out. And I sure as hell shouldn't have decided what kind of person you were before I actually knew you."
I had never admitted I was wrong to anyone. Truth was, I'd almost never believed I could be wrong. But now I saw exactly where I'd fucked up.
Her expression went blank for a heartbeat.
"I convicted you without proof," I went on. "That was on me."
"So you believe I didn't drive Isabella away?" she asked.
The photos in my office drawer still needed answers. Why Isabella had left, why she hadn't contacted anyone—I didn't have it all yet. But I couldn't keep pinning it on Elena just because it was convenient.
"I believe you," I said, holding her eyes.
Her eyes reddened at the corners. A tear slipped free when she blinked.
"You don't know what that means to me," she said, voice breaking. "You are Kiryan Morozov. Everyone listens to you. Nobody dares tell you you are wrong."
I lifted my hand and wiped the wet from the corner of her eye. "Just because nobody says it doesn't mean the wrong isn't real."
Goddamn it. I didn't want to see her cry again. I wanted her smile. I wanted to know what she liked besides painting. I wanted her to look at me without fear showing up first.
"Give me time," I said quietly. "At least let me prove I am not always an asshole. Okay?"
"That is going to take a long time," she said.
"I have patience."
That night, we talked in the studio for hours.
She told me how she'd secretly saved up to buy her first set of paints.
She told me she loved rainy days but hated thunder.
Outside the windows, the deep blue of night softened into gold.
The more we talked, the more she relaxed, and little by little she leaned closer.
Then she fell asleep against my shoulder. Her lashes rested on her cheeks, and the curve of her mouth still held the echo of her last smile.
I carried her back to my bed.
My wife should've been sleeping in my room.