Chapter 4 Maddox
MADDOX
A loud crash booms through my studio office, followed by an aggravating, grating “You got any food? I’m hungry.”
I shut my eyes and take a deep breath before pointing my paintbrush in the direction of my half-eaten lunch. I have neither the patience nor the neurons to deal with the verbal diarrhea that my brother might choose to let loose today.
“By all means,” I grit as I glare at the canvas in front of me. “Please, damage the hundred-year-old door.”
“Sorry,” Spencer murmurs, humming an annoying, nasally tune that has me approximately two seconds from murdering him with the aforementioned paintbrush. My patience is limited on the best of days. Lately, there isn’t a speck of it in existence.
He doesn’t come up behind me to look at my painting. He knows I won’t allow it. “You know that chick that I met at the bar last week?”
Here we go.
“Which one?” I turn to give him my full attention. Looking at the painting will only piss me off further.
“Not important.” He waves me off. Ever since he turned twenty-one, he spends half the week drinking and the other half flirting with every woman in New York. “Anyway, it turns out she’s a lecturer here.”
Oh, bloody hell.
I swipe my hand down my face. I swear, if this little shit gets me fired—I take a deep breath.
Sure, I love him, and he has a great many redeeming qualities that I’m not in the right frame of mind to recall.
It doesn’t mean I don’t want to kill him eighty-seven percent of the time. He’s a fucking twat.
“Who, pray tell, might that be?” So I know whether I should expect an email from HR.
My idiot of a brother shrugs. “Don’t remember. Blond, yea high, weirdly bony elbows.”
“You’ve just described a quarter of the teaching body.” I give him a deadpan stare. “Can you keep it in your pants for a full twenty-four hours? Is that too much to ask?”
“Probably.” Spencer snorts. “I can’t help that I’m young, fun, and completely undeniable.”
“You sound like you’re in your forties.”
“Yeah, you would know about that, old man.”
“Thirty-two is not old.” I glare at him.
Although my bloody knees feel like they belong to a geriatric.
Don’t even get me started on my back. I almost blew it out trying to break someone’s spine last week.
“See this?” Spencer motions at his face. “Not a wrinkle in sight. You should try using SPF, man. A girl in freshman year told me about it, and let me tell you: Game. Changer. I’m glowing like a baby. The MILFs love it.”
“If only you had that much dedication to quite literally any other aspect of your life. It’s wasted passion.” Admittedly, he’s too invested in the family business for my liking. It may well be the one thing he truly cares about.
He rolls his eyes. “I’m enjoying my youth, Dad.” He says it jokingly, but we both know it’s gone beyond that now.
I’m nothing like our sperm donor, but I sure as shit play more of a fatherly role than he does. It was me who made sure my younger brother ate, showered, did his homework, and paid for the football fees, and I made sure that his nappy was changed.
It wasn’t like the woman who gave birth to us was going to do it.
“Don’t be a dickhead.” I scowl. “All this sleeping around is going to bite you in the ass one day.”
Christ, I really do sound like an overbearing father.
“YOLO.” Fucking hell. “That’s a future-me problem.
Plus, everyone involved is aware that it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.
No hearts are getting hurt.” He grins, snags my food off my messy desk, plops onto the leather couch, kicks up his feet, and uses his chest as a plate.
“Give me ten. I’ve gotta do an online quiz. ”
“They’re meant to be an hour long.” I frown.
“Yup.” He winks.
The second his headphones are on, the spacious room is doused in calm, peaceful, absolutely blissful silence.
Or at least it would be all those things if he weren’t chewing so bloody loud.
The overgrown child is giving me gray hairs. If he weren’t a straight-A student, I’d be concerned about him half-arsing his classes. He comes here whenever he wants to “shoot the shit” or kill time between classes.
Sighing heavily, I stretch my neck to the side before refocusing my attention on my latest piece. It looks even worse under the harsh afternoon light.
Right.
That’s it, I’m throwing it away. There’s no salvaging it.
I wish there were a cathartic way to destroy a canvas without stabbing or snapping or throwing paint at it like a petulant child. Then I’d probably have a critic drop from the ceiling vents to dissect meaning and intention.
They’ll say I’m a creative genius with an eye for detail. They’ll claim I’m reviving art by experimenting with artistic styles and media. Then in the same breath, they’ll say that I’m out of touch, that all my work comes from the same disturbing vein, and I’ve passed my prime. That I lack vision.
The most offensive claim going around is that I’ve lost my muse and that we’ve “come to the end of Shaw’s era.”
What a load of horseshit.
My muse is every man who dies by my hands. They leave the world bent to my will. It’s the one and only time they would ever be anything close to beautiful. Art begets art.
Yet it’s slipping further from my fingers with every passing day that I move closer to becoming my father’s full-time dog. Art used to be a way to untangle the ties holding me together. Now, I don’t know what’s beneath the binding.
I glare at the painting of a human skeleton morphed with a cow’s. The metaphor is in the concept. I even took it a step further, texturizing the canvas with newspaper clippings of my kills.
Lack the vision.
Those fucking cunts.
The Fallen Angel piece at the Cresswell Art Gallery was meant to be my chance to prove that Maddox Shaw is still here.
It was inspired by a rich Wall Street type who pushed his pregnant wife down the stairs, killing her and their baby in the process.
Tatiana died, and the police did nothing.
Now he’s dead, and his ground-up veneers are in the golden filigree and jewelry of the painting.
I delivered justice, and I’m repaid by some student lecturing me about my painting?
As if being told I had to teach a class of film students wasn’t bad enough, I found out that the Louvre doesn’t want to extend the loan on two of my paintings.
The Order made me spend days searching for someone to replace Bradford while he’s suffering the consequences of pissing a secret society off.
In the end, Shepherd deemed me the only suitable and available person to take the position, given that the paper I recently published was on the symbiotic relationship between film and fine art.
And when Shepherd tells you to jump, you jump. He’ll break your knees if you don’t.
Picking up after Bradford wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t have my own classes and an art exhibit coming up, with no finished pieces.
After all that tedious fiasco, I went to the exhibit to check on my latest piece, only to find a girl staring at my painting for easily five minutes or more.
It hit me then: The perfect distraction came in the form of long hair, grabbable hips, and legs that would look impeccable over my shoulders.
That’s when she opened her mouth and said the same thing as every critic before her—albeit, far more openly and methodically than anyone else I’d encountered.
I returned after storming out, prepared to outline all the ways subjectivity trumped any claim of intimacy, but she stopped me short.
She was still there, staring at Fallen Angel.
I watched her, lost in thought like she was trying to dissect and absorb the very essence of the piece. She wasn’t looking at it like she hated it, nor like it was an offense to art or subpar in comparison to my other works.
It felt like a lifetime since anyone had looked at my work with awe. Yet she was doing exactly that.
When she walked into my class, I thought the fates were punishing me for my crimes.
It was the most difficult class I’d ever taught—not because the content was hard, I could’ve done it in my sleep.
But I kept wanting to look at the enigma that’s rendered me speechless twice now.
She was magnetic, and bloody fucking infuriating.
It’s truly baffling how disappointed I was when she walked out at the end without uttering a word to me. I was hoping she’d raise her hand to argue with me again—about quite literally anything, so I had a reason to stare at her, hear her husky voice, and attempt to put her in her place.
Is this what has become of me? Getting my kicks from a student who no doubt loathes me?
Huffing, I drop the brush made out of my victim’s hair into the water, then fall into my computer chair, lowering my glasses to pinch the bridge of my nose.
The printouts of Maria van Oosterwyck’s still-life paintings, Woman at Her Toilette, and other pieces of art created by women in that era taunt me out of the corner of my eye.
What Reyna said was right. I found her name after class and looked her up.
Had I known of her connection to Moraly Sinaga—a woman whose hand I’ve shook and pieces I’ve admired—I would have kept my opinion to myself, because her mother would have castrated me alive for talking to her daughter in such a way.
My knuckles bleach as I sneer at the canvas I’ve been working on since the day Reyna told me to do better.
I’ve failed. Again.
I see it now, the understanding she was talking about. It’s embarrassing I never spotted the subtle nuances in my work. It took a film student saying I paint like a man for me to notice the flaws in everything I’ve ever made.
The hard truth is that anyone who has ever said that I’ve created a masterpiece was mistaken.
Spencer’s groan drags my attention over to him. I raise a brow as he shucks off his headphones with a pained expression. “It’s Mom.”
Give me strength.