Chapter 4 “The Studio,”

“Chapter 3: The Studio,”

────── ꕥ ⋅ IVORY ⋅ ꕥ ──────

The studio he promised showed up two days later, and it wasn't a gesture. It was an entire floor.

Floor to ceiling windows. North light, the good kind painters actually want. Canvases stacked against the wall, already primed, already waiting. An easel that cost more than my car had.

I stood in the doorway and didn't move for a full minute.

"You hate it," Delphine said behind me, flat, like she'd already decided that was the correct read.

"I don't hate it." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "I don't know what to do with it."

"Paint, presumably." She checked her watch. "Lord Lenoir wants you to know the space is yours regardless of what happens with the contract. That was his exact wording. Regardless."

"Why does that feel like a trap?"

"Because you've never had anyone give you something without wanting something back." Delphine's face didn't change, but something in her voice softened half a degree. "He's not like that. Whatever else he is."

She left before I could ask what she meant by whatever else he is.

I spent the rest of the day painting for the first time in three months. Not because I wanted to impress anyone. Because my hands finally didn't feel like they belonged to someone drowning.

I painted the auction hall. The chandeliers. A man in the front row, ice blue eyes, still as a held breath.

I hated how easily his face came to me.

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He found me there at sunset, leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, watching me work without saying anything for long enough that I jumped when I finally noticed him.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough to see you paint me without realizing it." He nodded toward the canvas.

Heat crawled up my neck. "It's not you."

"It's very obviously me."

"Fine. It's you." I set the brush down. "Do you always let yourself into rooms without knocking?"

"I own the building."

"That's not the same as having manners."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, close to amused. "You're the first person in a long time who's talked to me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm not terrifying."

"You are terrifying," I said. "I'm just tired. Terror takes energy I don't have right now."

He laughed, actually laughed, low and short and surprised out of him like he hadn't planned on it. It changed his whole face, took ten years off him, made him look less like a monument and more like a man.

"Come," he said. "Walk with me. You've been inside all day."

"Is that an order or an invitation?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

He considered that longer than I expected. "Invitation. You can say no."

"Fine. Yes." I wiped my hands on a rag. "But only because I want to see if you're capable of small talk that doesn't involve blood contracts."

"No promises."

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We walked the grounds as the sky went orange, past a garden that looked untouched by anyone in years, roses gone wild and climbing a stone wall like they were trying to escape.

"Nobody tends this?" I asked.

"Nobody's allowed to." He said it simply, no explanation offered.

"Why not?"

"Because my sister planted it. And she's been dead two hundred years, and I can't bring myself to let anyone touch what she made."

I stopped walking. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was a long time ago." But his jaw tightened when he said it, and I understood, suddenly, that four hundred years didn't make grief smaller. It just gave it more time to root down deep.

"What happened to her?"

"The council happened to her." His voice went flat, controlled in a way that felt more dangerous than anger would have. "That's a story for a different night. If I tell you everything at once, you'll run, and honestly, Ivory, I'd rather you didn't."

"Why do you care if I run?"

He turned to face me fully then, and the sunset caught his eyes just right, and for one unguarded second I watched blue slide toward amber and back again like he couldn't quite decide which version of himself to show me.

"Because for the first time in longer than you'd believe," he said, quiet, "I don't want to be alone in this house."

The honesty of it knocked the air out of me.

"That's not fair," I said.

"What isn't?"

"Saying things like that. Making this feel like more than a contract." I wrapped my arms around myself even though it wasn't cold. "You told me yourself. The pleasure is biology. Chemistry. Don't confuse it for anything else, you said."

"I did say that." He stepped closer, slow, giving me every chance to step back. I didn't. "I'm starting to think I was wrong."

"Rage."

"I know." He stopped an arm's length away, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him despite everything he was, everything he wasn't supposed to have. "I know what I said. I know what the contract says. I know exactly how complicated this is about to get."

"Then why are you standing this close to me right now?"

"Because I've spent four hundred years being smart about everything," he said, low, rough at the edges. "And right now I don't particularly want to be smart."

My heart slammed against my ribs.

"We can't," I said, even as I didn't move away. "This is a business arrangement. You said so yourself."

"I did." His eyes dropped to my mouth for half a second before returning to my eyes, disciplined, deliberate. "And I meant it when I said it."

"But?"

"But you're standing in my sister's garden asking me questions nobody's asked me in two centuries, and I don't remember the last time I wanted to answer someone this badly." His hand lifted, hovered near my jaw, close enough to feel the warmth of it without touching. "Tell me to stop, Ivory. I will."

I should have told him to stop.

I opened my mouth to say it.

What came out instead was, "Don't."

His hand finally touched my jaw, gentle, careful, like I was something that could shatter if he wasn't. He leaned down slow enough that I had every chance in the world to change my mind.

I didn't.

His lips brushed mine, soft at first, testing, and then not soft at all, and I forgot every single reason this was a terrible idea the second his hand slid into my hair and pulled me closer.

Somewhere behind us, in the house, a phone started ringing.

Rage pulled back first, breathing hard, forehead resting against mine for one suspended second before the phone rang a second time and something in his face went sharp and alert.

"That's the emergency line," he said. "Nobody uses that unless something's wrong."

"Rage, what's happening?"

He was already moving, already pulling his phone from his pocket, already answering with a voice gone cold and commanding in a way I hadn't heard from him yet.

"Report," he snapped into the phone.

Whatever the voice on the other end said made every trace of the man who'd just kissed me disappear completely.

"They found the house," he said, more to himself than to me, eyes flashing full amber now, no blue left at all. "How did they find the house?"

"Who found what house?" I asked, panic rising in my throat.

He looked at me like he'd forgotten I was standing there.

"Go inside, Ivory," he said. "Now. Lock the door. Don't come out until I tell you it's safe."

"Tell me what's going on."

"There's no time." He was already moving toward the front gates, shoulders squared, something predatory settling over him like a second skin. "Go. Please."

I'd never heard him say please before.

That scared me more than anything else that had happened all night.

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