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I exhaled a quick breath. He really had to stop buying outrageous gifts for me; I was more than happy with chicken nuggets and the morning after pill.
“I tried,” he added a little sourly, “but they were resistant to a buyer.”
A laugh burst from me, rising through the high ceilings of the entryway when Damien opened the gallery door for me. Inside was airy and hushed, almost reverent. No one sat behind the welcome desk, but a woman clad in a smart shirt and trousers stood off to the side. She nodded at Damien, a little stiffly. Then again, he’d tried to buy her museum. She probably thought he was one of those rich assholes.
“Stop buying things,” I chided, jabbing my husband in the ribs with a finger and meeting hard steel under his shirt. It was no wonder why my husband was covered in weapons; his mind must keep wandering to Artur the way mine did. But fear wouldn’t kill my excitement, not with Damien here to keep me safe and Jonathan and the security team as backup. No one would get throughallof them.
“Demands like that hurt my feelings,” Damien said, pretending to sulk. “I might have to buy you a museum just to recover.”
I snorted, squeezing his hand. “So, where are we exploring first?”
“Wherever you like, my queen,” he replied, not lowering his voice even though we were surrounded by beefy, scowling men and women. Damien really didn’t give a shit that they knew the sweet name he called me, and that made both my face heat and my chest warm. Jonathan didn’t even snort this time, which meant he was getting used to it.
“There’s a gift shop!” I gasped, my eyes widening at the racks and shelves of enticing notebooks, colourful art prints, and thelittle brightly coloured erasers I used to collect as a kid. “I want everything.”
“Done,” Damien said with a nod.
“No.” I shook my head hard, giving him a warning look.“No.Damien, what did we literally just say?”
“That buying you the contents of a gift shop will cost considerably less than buying you a museum?” he offered with an innocent expression.
“Sneaky,” I laughed and leaned up to kiss him. “I’ll allow you to buy ten things. Twenty, maximum.”
“Fifty,” he countered, his eyes sharpening with intensity.
Butterflies quivered in my stomach, and I remembered the day we played pool, when he fixated on uncovering truth after truth about me with the same predatory intensity.
“Thirty.”
“Forty.”
“Thirty,” I repeated.
Jonathan chuckled behind us.
“Thirty-five.”
“Fine, I’ll allow it.”
Damien grinned like he’d won, and I didn’t point out that I’d got him down from his original fifty—and down from an entire bloody museum. I squeezed his hand and picked a room at random, towing my husband and our security team into it.
Wonder filled my heart as I craned my neck to stare at the rich vermillion walls and the bright white ceiling. Even without artwork, this space would be sacred. It spoke to my soul, pulling me deeper into the room, drawing me to the paintings on the walls and capturing me there for so long that I wondered if I’d fallen under a spell.
“You love art,” Damien said as if he’d just realised what I had.
“I… never knew,” I replied, barely above a whisper. I forced myself to move onto the next piece, reading the card beside it.
It was like a weight fell off my shoulders as we walked around the room, finding other paintings that drew me like the first, like they were magnetised and my heart couldn’t help but be attracted to them. I loved the brightly coloured ones as much as the muted pieces, loved modern works full of emotion and power as much as I loved older portraits of dreary women and stoic men. By the time we’d been here an hour, I’d uncovered a part of myself that had been dead for as long as I could remember, and I couldbreatheagain. I hadn’t realised I’d been suffocating all my life until we walked into this building.
“I don’t get it,” Jonathan said finally, like he’d been holding the words in. He snapped a photo of this painting on his phone, like he’d done intermittently through our wanderings. “It’s just a painting of a woman drowning; what’s the big deal?”
“She’s not drowning,” I disagreed, unable to take my eyes off John William Waterhouse’sThe Lady of Shalott.“She’s exhausted. Tired of fighting,” I added quieter, my own demons wrapping around me like a shroud. “She’s given up, but there’s still colour, still flowers.”
“Pretty sure she’s dead, Vasya.”
I shot our surly guard a scowl, but I was glad he was finally calling me Vasya. It had taken weeks of coaxing.
“You’re both right, actually,” Damien cut in, his arm wrapped around me now. He gazed at the painting absent the deep, aching sadness I felt and the sceptical scorn Jonathan exhibited. “It’s based on a poem where she can only see the world through a mirror’s reflection, and she does get exhausted and tired of it. But when she turns to see the world with her own eyes, she dies. Then some vapid prince sees her floating corpse on the river and says she’s pretty.”
