Chapter 21 #2
I keep watch near the entrance, listening for footsteps or voices. But there's nothing. Just the sound of her pencil on paper and the distant hum of the city. She draws for two hours.
When she's done, she has three new pieces for the second portfolio of drawings of the hospital's death rendered in charcoal and graphite, the eerie nature made beautiful.
"This has been great," she says, showing me the work.
"Something new."
"We should do this in every city. Find the abandoned places, the forgotten spaces. Document them."
"We will, plus it puts more distance from us to the US. Other countries will create confusion."
“Its finally coming together, Dom. I’m so happy.”
The factory in Wedding appears three nights later. I find it during a daylight hunt, an abandoned metalworks facility near the canal, chain-link fence rusted through, windows broken like missing teeth. A place that's been forgotten by everyone except squatters and urban explorers.
We arrive in the early hours of the morning while the city sleeps as the scanner's been quiet for hours. The smell hits us first when we slip through the fence, industrial rot mixed with rust and old machine oil. Something chemical and wrong that makes my throat tight.
"This is great," Roxy whispers.
Inside, the factory floor stretches out like a church of abandonment.
Massive machinery sits silent and corroded, conveyor belts frozen mid-motion, metal grinding wheels that haven't turned in decades.
Moonlight streams through the broken skylights, creating geometric patterns on the concrete floor.
Roxy's already moving, her camera raised, capturing the way light cuts through darkness and dust. She photographs for thirty minutes, mainly wide shots of the factory floor, close-ups of rusted machinery, the way time has transformed industrial death into something almost beautiful.
Then she sets up her sketchbook on an old workbench.
"This is going to take a while," she says, her pencil already moving.
"I've got time."
But watching her isn't enough. Not here. Not surrounded by this much darkness. I move behind her, my hands sliding around her waist, pulling her back against me.
"Dom, what are you doing?"
"Keep drawing."
My hands move under her shirt, finding bare skin. She gasps but doesn't stop working, her pencil still moving across the paper even as I touch her.
"You're distracting me."
"Good."
I kiss her neck, feeling her pulse racing under my lips. My hands move higher, cupping her breasts through her bra, and she arches into my touch.
"I need to finish this."
"Then finish it, that’s your challenge."
My hand lowers down, sneaking under the elastic of her leggings, before pushing inside of her underwear.
“I…can’t work if you’re touching me.”
“Then I’ll stop. Do you want me to stop?”
“Fuck no.”
I smirk as she struggles to put pencil to paper, her hands shaking as my fingers start to move over her clit. First in circular motions, before working my fingers back and forth, back and forth. My fingers are already covered in her wetness and I lean down to whisper in her ear.
“Open your legs,” I say, and she complies.
I push two fingers inside her pussy with no resistance.
She moans and lifts her ass up, chasing my fingers to go deeper.
I push inside up to my knuckles and finger fuck her until she struggles to even hold on to her pencil.
It drops to the floor as she reaches behind her to hold onto my neck.
I finger her fuck her hard, using my thumb to play with her clit. Her moans intensify and echo in the large open space, her breathing giving me the warning that she is about to cum.
“Drench my fingers, baby. Cum for me.” I growl into her neck and she clamps her thighs around my hands as she shakes, exploding with pleasure. My dick is so fucking hard, but this isn’t about me. I just wanted to test her limits.
When I remove my fingers, I suck them into my mouth before taking her lips in a fast and hard kiss.
“You better finish up, we haven’t got all night,” I say, laughing as she goes to slap me.
“Asshole. You were distracting me.”
“And now you are without distraction. I’ll wait over here,” I say, moving toward the back wall near the door.
The taste of her lingers on my mouth, so fucking good.
When she returns to her sketchbook, she works for another hour while I keep watch, my body still humming with the aftermath of her cumming. By the time we leave, she has five new pieces, some drawings of machinery, the factory's demise rendered beautiful through her vision.
The cemetery in Renkow comes next.
It's extremely old, forgotten, where graves have been abandoned for decades. Headstones lean at wrong angles, moss covering names and dates until they're barely readable. Trees grow wild between plots, their roots breaking through concrete and marble.
The smell is different here, it’s wet earth and old wind carrying the scent of rain and old flowers left too long.
We arrive at dusk, that liminal time when the light is dying but darkness hasn't fully taken over. Roxy moves through the cemetery like she's visiting old friends. Stops at graves, reads the faded inscriptions, photographs the way time has transformed grief into something else.
"Look at this one," she says, kneeling beside a family plot. "Mother, father, three children. All died within two years of each other. 1947 to 1949."
"War?"
"Probably. Or disease. Starvation." She traces the mother's name with her finger. "They're all together though, that's something."
"You think about that? Being together after?"
She looks up at me, her eyes serious. "I think about us being together. However that looks."
"We will be."
"Promise?"
"Baby, you’re never gonna be rid of me."
She stands and kisses me, soft and tender.
"I want to draw them," she says. "The family. The way they're still together even in death."
She sits on the wet grass and starts working.
I stand nearby, watching the cemetery entrance, making sure we're alone.
The wind picks up, cold and sharp, carrying the smell of approaching rain.
Roxy doesn't seem to notice as she's lost in the work, her pencil moving across paper, capturing the family plot and the poetry of death.
"Do you think they knew?" she asks after a while. "That they'd all end up here together?"
"Maybe.”
She works for another hour, creating four new pieces of the family plot, individual headstones, the way moss and time have transformed grief into beauty, a wide shot of the cemetery at dusk that looks like a painting.
When she's done, the rain starts. Just a drizzle at first, then it comes down harder so we run back to the car.
"I love you," she says quietly when we get inside the car.
"I know."
"Say it back."
"I love you. More than anything."
"Good. Don't forget it."
"Never."
The Soviet apartment complex in Marzahn is our last hunt.
It's massive, a brutalist concrete monolith that stretches for blocks, built during East Germany's communist era and abandoned after reunification. The kind of place that was meant to house thousands, but now sits empty, a monument to failed ideology.
We arrive at midnight. The complex is dark except for a few broken streetlights casting orange pools on cracked pavement.
Inside, the hallways stretch endlessly. Identical doors, identical walls, identical emptiness.
The smell is concrete dust and mold and something else, maybe it’s the residue of lives lived and abandoned.
Roxy photographs methodically. The repetition of doors, the way decay has made each identical unit somehow unique, the graffiti left by urban explorers and squatters.
In one apartment, we find a child's toy, a small wooden horse, hand-carved, sitting on a windowsill like someone just set it down and forgot to come back.
Roxy picks it up carefully, turning it over in her hands.
"Someone made this," she says. "Carved it by hand and gave it to their child."
"And then left it behind."
"Or couldn't take it with them. When the wall fell, when everything changed, maybe they had to leave too fast."
She photographs the toy in place, then sketches it from multiple angles. The way it sits alone in the empty apartment, a reminder that real people lived here once.
"This is what I want to capture," she says. "Not just the end, but the humanity underneath it. The proof that people were here, that they mattered."
"You're doing that. Every piece shows it."
"You think so?"
"I know so."
We work through the complex for three hours. By the time we leave, Roxy has eleven new pieces – photographs and drawings of the brutalist architecture, the abandoned apartments, the wooden horse, the way humanity persists even in death.
Back at our Berlin apartment, we spread all the work across the floor. Twenty-five pieces total. The hospital, the factory, the cemetery, the Soviet complex. Each one showing a different facet of decomposing, each one beautiful in its darkness.
"This is the second portfolio," Roxy says, studying the work. "This is what comes next."
"It's good. Really good."
"Better than the first?"
"Different. More mature, like you're finding meaning in it."
She looks up at me, her eyes bright. "That's exactly what I'm doing."
I pull her into my lap and she settles against me, both of us looking at the work spread before us.
We make love slowly that night, surrounded by the work, celebrating what we've built together. Not just the art, but the partnership. The understanding that we're stronger together than we ever were alone.
By the time we leave Berlin, the second portfolio is complete. Twenty-five pieces ready for the next phase, the next exhibition, the next step in building something sustainable from our shared darkness.
"Six months," Roxy says on the flight back to San Diego. "Then we release the second portfolio."
"Same strategy?"
"Exactly. Anonymous submission, remote communication. The mystery continues."
She rests her head on my shoulder, understanding that we've found something rare, a way to be exactly who we are while staying invisible.
And no one knowing the truth except us.
……………..
The flight back to San Diego is long.
Roxy sleeps most of the way, her head on my shoulder, her hand laced with mine. I watch her sleep and think about the last three months.
New York. Berlin. The international circuit expanding.
Detective Chen investigating but hitting walls.
The mystery growing, the theories multiplying.
RB is becoming more valuable with each exhibition, each failed attempt to identify the artist. We're building something sustainable. And no one can touch us.
When we land in San Diego, there's an email waiting from Sarah Vance.
Galleries in Miami, LA, and Tokyo have expressed interest in RB’s work. Would you be open to discussing a broader international circuit?
Roxy reads it over my shoulder, then looks up at me.
"What do you think?"
"I think we keep moving, but I won’t be able to attend every event, I won’t be able to get the time off work."
"We can be selective."
"We can manage it.”
She kisses me.
"Good."
Because this is working, being celebrated with nobody knowing who the hell we are.