There was a faint click.
She stood, twisted the now unlocked door, and pushed it open.
Darkness greeted her first.
Then the smell of oil paint and turpentine.
Her heart began to thud as she reached for the switch.
Then the lights came on.
For a moment, her eyes went to the nearest thing in the room, not the walls.
An easel, set apart from everything else, angled toward the window where the light would have been best during the day. A canvas rested on it, the paint catching the overhead light with a faint sheen that the older work around it didn't have.
It was painted recently.
She stepped closer before she understood what she was looking at.
He had painted her.
Her eyes looked bright with fury. But beneath it, the painting had captured something else. Hurt.
It was from their last breakfast together and at the exact moment before she'd torn the pendant from her neck.
He had painted this after.
After she had walked out of this palace, believing he felt nothing.
He had come into this room and painted the way she looked at him while she hated him.
Her hand lifted toward the canvas. Stopped just short of the surface. The paint hadn't fully dried. In places, especially around her eyes, it still had a faint sheen that the older work around it didn't have.
She pulled her hand back.
She turned from the easel, and only now did the rest of the room come into her focus.
Canvases lined three walls—framed, unframed, large and small, arranged in rows that ran the length of the studio.
The paintings nearest the easel were the most recent.
A frozen lake, silver under winter light, her own boots stamping the ice.
A wooden cabin in snow, firelight through a window.
An apple orchard in spring, petals caught mid-fall.
Soft golds and blues, nothing like the fire in the painting on the easel.
Then, further along, a smaller canvas.
Herself, asleep.
Her hair loose across a pillow. Her hand curled near her face. The angle was close, intimate, the kind of view only possible from someone lying beside her. She was wearing just the emerald fish pendant.
He had lain beside her and memorized her. Had carried it out of sleep and into paint.
Her throat tightened.
