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Ronan lifted his head from the wall and turned to find the other Varik twin leaning on the door with his arms folded over his chest. The office was now significantly more crowded than it needed to be, but he had to hold on to the hope that all these crafty brains would come up with something.
“Okay, Ronan. Please tell us what’s wrong,” Bel prodded.
Sucking in a deep breath, Ronan stepped away from the wall and faced the brothers and the mates that were present. “Ethan informed me that a rare cache of paintings was uncovered in the Netherlands. They’re believed to be painted by a yet-to-be-discovered Old Master, someone who supposedly apprenticed under Rembrandt.”
“I’m guessing you’re responsible for these paintings?” Winter prodded.
“Wait! You studied under Rembrandt?TheRembrandt?” River gasped before he could reply.
“Yes,” Ronan said to Winter and then turned to River. “No. I never apprenticed under Rembrandt. We both apprenticed under Jacob van Swanenburg as well as Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. I knew Rembrandt—nice kid—but I never studied under him. We developed a somewhat similar style in those early years, but he went on to fine-tune his technique while I moved to France and went in a different direction.”
“So, what was found was a collection of paintings that you left behind in Amsterdam?” Bel inquired.
“Yes. About thirty or so, if I’m remembering correctly.” Ronan huffed angrily at himself and shook his head. “I left them with a friend. I was planning to send for them once I got settled, but then the war broke out, I got distracted, and completely forgot they even existed.”
“What war?” Fox asked.
“Huh?”
“What war broke out?” he repeated.
Ronan shrugged. “Who knows? There was almost always a war happening in Europe while I was there. I just tried to stay out of the way of the fighting.”
Rafe pressed his fingers into his forehead and rubbed. “Forgive my confusion, but who cares? I’m sure they’re lovely paintings, but do they even matter? How are they going to link them back to you?”
“Ronan isn’t the issue here,” Ethan broke in. “It’s Aiden.”
“The paintings are largely landscapes, but I also painted at least a dozen portraits of Aiden from memory,” Ronan admitted softly.
Fox lurched forward on the sofa, leaning toward Ronan. “Seriously?”
Winter’s brow furrowed. “But if we’re talking Rembrandt, that’s like…six hundred years after you last saw Aiden. How accurate could they be?”
Ronan narrowed his eyes on the youngest Varik and tried not to clench his teeth. “Would you forget the details of Fox’s face after a mere six centuries?”
Winter paled and his arm tightened around his mate, pulling him a little closer. “No. No, I wouldn’t.”
An ache went through Ronan’s heart for Winter, and the brief irritation evaporated. Winter lived with the daily fear of losing Fox because he was still largely human. While he respected the witch’s desire to continue to study magic, part of him wished Fox would just decide to become a vampire and save Winter the constant worry. He didn’t want Winter to suffer the pain he had of losing a soulmate too soon.
The ghost of an old ache shuffled across his soul, and he fought back a shiver. A thousand years they’d been separated. After that horrible night, he’d been sure Aiden was gone, but Ronan never forgot about him.
Boredom had driven him to take up painting and when he’d landed training under a portrait master, he found himself returning again and again to Aiden’s face. He’d spent a human lifetime staring into those beautiful eyes, memorizing the curve of his lips, the angle of his jawline. He’d wanted to immortalize Aiden’s image, to have it perfectly captured so that he could look upon Aiden whenever he was feeling lonely.
“Well then, the question is: How good of a painter were you?” Rafe asked, lowering his hand to his side.
“I was very good. I started my studies under Titian in the early sixteenth century, learning the Venetian style, before heading north. I’d been painting for nearly a century already when I started my line of portraits of Aiden.”
“The problem is,” Ethan broke in “that while humans won’t think much of the subject, it’s highly likely that vampires are going to realize that the subject of the paintings is Aiden, the new king of the Americas.”
“And that breaks one of our most basic rules—leave behind no proof of our immortality,” Winter finished coldly. “Even though Ronan is the painter and Aiden had no idea they existed, Aiden is still going to feel the backlash because the European Ministry is still being pissy about Aiden taking control over here.”
“Where are the paintings?” Bel asked.
“They’re currently being held by Christie’s in London for authentication. Afterward, they are to be auctioned off,” Ronan said.
“So far, they’ve posted only a handful of images, including two of portraits. Neither of which were of Aiden.” Ethan sighed. He shoved a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up. “Ronan’s right. He’s really good. Even without seeing them, I have a feeling they look just like Aiden.”
“Eh. Easy enough,” Rafe declared with a yawn. “Get Winter to break in and steal the Aiden portraits.”
