Chapter 21
Nick
THE ART MUSEUM WAS only three blocks from the diner, but we took our time getting there.
Nadya moved like a different person than yesterday.
Not bouncy, exactly, but there was an absence of the usual tension—the kind that coils around her spine and makes her walk a half-step behind.
Today, she walked next to me, close enough our sleeves brushed.
Maybe it was the pancakes. Maybe it was the leftover buzz of not waking up haunted. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to jinx it.
The museum itself was an old brick building sandwiched between two office towers. We entered through a double set of glass doors to find a whole lot of white walls with art hanging at a respectable distance from each other and an occasional pedestal on marble floors.
It was early, so only two other visitors wandered the galleries—an elderly woman with cloud-white hair, and a man who looked like he’d been abandoned here by a tour group.
The front desk was manned by a college-age girl who handed over two passes with a smile and waved us toward the main exhibit.
We started in the modern art section. Huge canvases, stripes and blocks of color, shapes that looked like an accident.
Nadya moved from piece to piece with a predator’s focus, as if she might catch the artist lurking behind the paint.
Sometimes, she’d lean in, head cocked, reading the little plaques.
“What do you think about this one?” I asked about a hideous piece with so many colors it should come with a seizure warning.
“You can tell from this blob of red that the artist was haunted by the ghost of a clown,” Nadya said with all the seriousness of an art critique.
I shook my head, unable to hide my smile, then moved right on, following Nadya like an overeager puppy.
The longer we walked, the less I watched the painting, shifting all my attention to the fascinating woman next to me. The way she moved—restless but deliberate. The way her eyes never let anything slip by, even if she pretended not to care.
We reached an exhibit with old portraits, all oil paint and gold frames. The effect was like walking into a room full of eyes. Nadya stopped in front of a girl in a blue dress, maybe eight or nine, posing stiffly with her hands folded and her face too serious for a child.
Nadya stared at the portrait, and the air around her seemed to get colder. The muscles in her jaw tensed, and her hands curled into a fist at her side.
After a minute, she said, “I hate how they made kids sit so still for these. I tried modeling one time. One time. That’s it. I couldn’t handle sitting for that long.”
“Having cameras is definitely an improvement,” I offered even though I wanted to say so much more. Her reaction didn’t seem to be just about posing.
Instead, I guided Nadya away from this exhibit. The further we got from the heavy old portraits, the lighter Nadya became. In the sculpture room, she circled a piece of twisted metal and declared it “the world’s most dangerous playground.”
In the photography wing, she dragged me in front of a series of black-and-white portraits—stark faces against charcoal backgrounds, some smiling with teeth too white, others staring with hollow eyes. Nadya's fingers wrapped around my wrist as she pulled me closer, her shoulder pressed against mine.
"Let's play a game," she whispered, her breath warm against my ear. "Which one's the serial killer and which one's the petty thief?" She pointed to a man with slicked-back hair and a woman whose smile didn't quite reach her eyes, both frozen in time behind glass.
I pointed at the guy with the slicked-back hair, his tie only slightly off-center. “That one’s the killer. No one puts that much product in unless they’re overcompensating for a personality disorder.”
Nadya eyed him, then grinned. “You do know how to profile.”
“Years of training.” I tilted my head at the woman, whose fingers gripped her purse strap. “That’s a petty thief right there. She’d break into your car for quarters but feels guilty about it after.”
“You’re full of shit.” Nadya’s voice was soft, but there was a spark in her eyes. She leaned closer, squinting at the nameplate. “Look—he’s a priest. And she’s a city councilwoman.”
“In my experience, the councilwoman’s more likely to bury you in a shallow grave.”
She laughed, the sound raw and unfiltered. I wanted to bottle it so I could listen to it whenever I needed to lift my own mood. But Nadya was already pulling me further, having me guessing the secret lives of strangers, making up stories for every frozen face.
The last gallery opened up into a huge atrium, light flooding through a domed ceiling onto a massive installation of paper cranes, hundreds of them suspended by invisible wire. Nadya stretched on her toes, counting under her breath.
“The plaque says there’s a thousand,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows. “Yes, but how do you know they’re not lying?”
“Good point, but I’ll let you check on your own.”
She circled under the cranes, face relaxed.
“Vera used to fold these out of junk mail and leave them all over the apartment.” Nadya’s eyes tracked a single slip of white printer paper, dangling above our heads like bait.
“So, I started making paper chickens. The kind that if you tug on their legs the right way they look like they’re pooping.
It turned into a contest of who’d get the junk mail first.”
I watched her watching the cranes, the afternoon light reflected in her eyes. What would it take to keep her in this light mood?
She caught me looking and rolled her eyes. “Don’t get sappy on me.”
“Too late,” I said.
She gave me a shy smile that looked so odd on her. It’s like the mask of this happy-go-lucky woman who laughed too hard slipped, and the real Nadya emerged.
She pulled me through the rest of the museum until somewhere around the exit, we passed a wall of community art—paintings and sketches from local students. One of them caught Nadya’s eye: a mess of color and texture, wild and unfiltered, with a tiny figure peeking out from a corner.
She stood there, staring. “See? That’s art. It doesn’t pretend. It just... is.”
I tried to read her mind, but she shook her head like she could feel it happening. “Don’t analyze me, Tuna.”
“I wasn’t,” I lied. “But if you want my expert opinion, I think you’re better than anyone on this wall. Talk about having art evoke emotions.”
She rolled her eyes. “It must’ve been someone too high on his own self-importance who came up with the idea that art must inspire emotions.
Sometimes, art is advertising. Sometimes, it’s storytelling.
Sometimes, it’s an illustration.” She waved at the massive chandelier above us.
“Look at that thing. Someone designed it, and its purpose isn’t emotions, but it sure as hell looks like art to me. ”
I squinted against the light spilling from the giant contraption made of hundreds of crystals.
“I used to like art in comic books better than pretty much everything we’ve seen here,” I agreed.
Maybe I wasn’t a complete idiot when it came to art. I just enjoyed different kinds of art from what was shown here.
We circled back to the lobby to find the place was a little busier—a couple of families with strollers, a pair of college kids holding hands. Nadya’s expression was unreadable, but I got the sense she was building a whole story for each of them in her head.
She nudged me with her shoulder. “You hungry again?”
I checked the time. Damn, the art museum took longer than I had expected, and we still needed to grab our stuff from the studio.
“We could hit the coffee shop by the train,” I said.
She nodded, and we made our way out.
As soon as we stepped onto the sidewalk, the outside world hit me like a flashbang. Traffic, wind, some guy yelling on his phone. I went right back into scan mode, checking every corner, windows, and faces in the crowd. Nothing flagged as a threat, but it was muscle memory.
The walk to the studio was quiet. At the door, Nadya unlocked and let us in. The light inside was different than yesterday—softer, a little golden, dust motes spinning in the shafts from the windows.
Nadya’s painting stood on the easel, dry now, the colors even wilder than I remembered. The bottle and blood had a sheen to them, almost alive in the light. Her bag was propped against the wall, and my jacket was draped over a chair.
She went to the painting, stood in front of it for a long time. “You really think this is better than what’s in the museum?”
I came closer, the distance between us shrinking until we stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the canvas.
“I do,” I said honestly.
She looked up at me, and in the dim studio light, her eyes looked darker, deeper. For a second, I forgot every reason why I should keep my distance. The whole professional boundary thing, the trauma, the fact that I was supposed to protect her, not fall for her.
She must’ve seen it on my face because she smirked and said, “You’re about to do something stupid, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I admitted right as I lowered my lips to her.
The kiss turned desperate and messy, teeth and tongue and the taste of a hundred unsaid things. Her hands clutched at my shirt, pulling me in, and I backed her into the wall, careful of the painting but not much else.
She made a sound—half laugh, half gasp—and pulled away just enough to say, “You’re such a bad influence, Agent Santana.”
“Only returning the favor,” I said, and kissed her again.
This time, it was slower. Her hands traced my jaw, my neck, the line of my spine. My own hands wandered, memorizing the curve of her back, the way her ribs flared out under her sweater, the heat of her skin through the fabric. I wanted to map every inch of her.
We broke apart, breathless. She stared at me with an intensity that made my heart race.
“I wanted this since I saw you again,” she said, voice raw.
“Me too.” I couldn’t even pretend I hadn’t thought about it every hour of every day.
She grinned, a little wild. “So, what now? You going to sweep me off my feet, or just make out in every train station from here to Brooklyn?”
“We shouldn’t do either,” I reminded her. “I don’t want to screw this case up.”
“I kind of want to screw you though,” she fired back.
I groaned at the memory of being balls-deep inside her, holding her to me, kissing her soft skin. Fuck, I wanted that so bad.
“We really shouldn’t,” I insisted, but I didn’t move away, and in my mind I was imagining offloading the case to Renat so I could be free to date my girl.