10. Tristan
TRISTAN
The art supply store was my idea. I’m starting to regret it.
Not because of Stella. She’s having the time of her life.
We’ve been here for forty minutes, and she’s touched nearly every product in the building.
Picking things up, reading the labels, putting them back, and picking up different things.
She’s explained the difference between student-grade and artist-grade paint to me three times.
She smelled a charcoal pencil. I didn’t know that was something people did with charcoal pencils, but she held it to her nose and breathed in before making a face like she was testing a fine wine.
“This one’s good,” she decides, dropping it in the basket I’m carrying. It’s starting to get heavy. There are already six tubes of paint, a palette knife, and a roll of canvas.
“Are we working off a list?” I ask as I follow her.
“The list is in my head.” She taps a finger to her temple while examining a bottle of linseed oil. “And it keeps growing.”
This was supposed to get her out of the house.
She’s been on the property for a week, and the only time she’s left the house is to meet Poptart, which didn’t even get her beyond the walls of the compound.
Things went well until the horse sneezed, and Stella jumped so hard she knocked over a bucket, which made Lillie laugh until she almost wet her pants.
I’ve noticed Stella orders everything online, right down to a new cushion for Socks after he wore the old one out.
It seemed unhealthy, which led me to suggest we go to the store so she could pick things out in person and feel sunlight that hasn’t been filtered through a window.
The wind velocity was twelve miles per hour, which in her words was “not ideal, but manageable.”
So here we are, in a store that smells like wood and something faintly chemical she told me was turpentine. “Don’t worry. It smells better when it’s actually being used.” As if I’m the one with the sensitivity issues.
She moves to the next aisle and starts pulling brushes out of their slots, one at a time, fanning them against her palm and holding them up to the fluorescent light. They look exactly the same to me. “Feel this,” she murmurs, holding one out.
I touch the bristles. “Soft.”
“That’s sable. Real sable. Feel the difference.” She holds up another one.
“Also soft?”
My truthfulness earns me a frown. “That’s synthetic. It’s completely different.”
“They feel the same to me.”
She looks at me the way Socks looks at me when I put his pellets in the wrong bowl.
Patient disappointment from someone who expected better.
“They are not the same. One of them holds paint and releases it evenly while the other fights you the whole time. Imagine if your gun worked perfectly, but then someone gave you a gun that sort of worked but also randomly jammed every third shot.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s exactly the same,” she insists. “The brush is my weapon.” She puts both brushes in the basket before adding, “I’m getting both for demonstration purposes. You’re going to learn the difference if it kills us.”
“It might kill us. This basket weighs at least ten pounds.”
“Art is heavy. Emotionally and physically.”
She’s happy. I wish I could pay her the attention she deserves, but that’s an impossibility at the moment. Because while she schools me on the finer points of paintbrushes, I’m paying attention to the man in aisle six.
He came through the front door of the shop a few minutes after we did, which is either a coincidence or it isn’t.
He’s not shopping. He’s holding a container of acrylic medium he hasn’t looked at once, and he’s been in three aisles so far.
Wouldn’t you know, it just so happens he’s always been trailing a section behind us.
It took a minute to place the face, but I know it.
The Mexican restaurant. He was one of the two who walked in, the pair that made me throw cash on the table and move Stella out the door.
He’s the one with the thick neck. The other one—fish eyes—isn’t here, or isn’t visible. That doesn’t mean he’s not close.
Thick Neck is a member of the Castellano crew.
I’m sure of it. They’ve been making noise since the situation with Quinn and Lillie, continuing to push boundaries and test how far they can go before Dorian pushes back in a big way.
This isn’t random. The man followed us here, which means someone’s been watching the property.
This is a bigger problem than one guy holding a jar of acrylic medium he doesn’t know how to use.
Throughout all of this, Stella is comparing two shades of blue that look identical to me and explaining why they’re actually completely different.
Something about undertones. I nod while watching Thick Neck in my peripheral vision.
He’s pretending to read a label, but his eyes keep flicking toward us.
This isn’t amateur hour—he knows how to tail.
He doesn’t know I’ve already made him, though, which is the only advantage I need.
“Tristan? Are you listening?”
“Ultramarine has a red undertone. Cerulean pulls green.”
Her mouth falls open. “You were listening.”
“I always listen.” I take the ultramarine from her hand and put it in the basket. “Get the cerulean, too.”
“I don’t need both.”
“Get both.”
She gives me a look, then drops the tube in the basket, which I put on the floor between us.
While I’m down there, I check the end of the aisle in the security mirror mounted on the ceiling.
Thick Neck has moved. He’s at the end of our aisle now, facing a shelf of easels with his back to us.
His jacket is bulky on the left side. That could be a lot of things, most of which are bad.
I need to get Stella out of this situation without her being in the middle of it.
“Hey.” I straighten up and put my hand on the small of her back. I can see the shift in her eyes when she looks up at me. She’s reading my face, picking up on what has changed. “I need you to do something for me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong. I just need to step outside for a minute, and I want you to stay in the store.”
Her eyebrows draw together. “Why?”
“I need to make a call. A work thing. It’s loud out front, so I’m going to step around the side of the building. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
She’s not buying it. Her brain is cataloguing the details—my jaw, my eyes, the tone of my voice, the hand on her back that’s firmer than usual. She’s a smart girl, and right now that intelligence is working against me. “I want to go with you.”
“I need you to stay inside.” I keep my voice level, one eye always on that mirror so I can check Thick Neck’s progress. “Five minutes. Stay in the paint aisle. Pick out the rest of what you need. I’ll be right back.”
She holds my gaze for a long beat before nodding slowly. It’s obvious she doesn’t like this, but she’s doing it anyway, because she trusts me.
I squeeze her shoulder and walk toward the front of the store.
I don’t look at Thick Neck or change my pace before pushing through the front door.
The afternoon air hits me before I turn left, rounding the corner of the building toward the narrow alley running between the store and the dry cleaners next to it.
The alley is shadowed and tight. A dumpster, stacked pallets. I take it all in without slowing down, because this is what I do.
Positioning myself behind the dumpster, out of the sightline from the street, I wait. There’s a broken piece of pallet on the ground near my foot, which I pick up and toss against the wall opposite me, where it cracks and clatters loud enough to sound like someone walking.
It only takes thirty seconds before Thick Neck rounds the corner. One hand is inside his jacket, going for whatever makes the left side bulky. His eyes are pointed toward the back of the alley, toward the sound of the broken pallet. That means they’re not pointed at me.
I come off the wall, and my hand catches his wrist before it clears the jacket.
I twist it outward—hard, fast—and his whole body follows, momentum doing most of the work.
His back hits the dumpster with a sound that rings through the alley.
The hand that was going for his weapon is pinned between my fist and the metal, and my other forearm is across his throat.
Not crushing. Not yet. Just enough that he knows the next six inches are available if I need them.
Yes, this is definitely him. He walked in with his partner, and they stood by the door and looked at my girl. I only left because Stella was with me, and I didn’t want her in the middle of it.
She’s not here now.
His face is red. His eyes are wide. Up close, I can see the details—a scar along his jaw, a gold chain disappearing under his collar. The bulge under his jacket is, in fact, a gun. I don’t take it yet. I want him scared before I take his options away.
“Hi there,” I growl in his ear after leaning in close enough to smell the fear that’s beginning to leak out of his pores. “How about you tell me what the fuck you think you’re doing?”