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My eyebrows knitted together. “Okay.”
“You should see it. It’s the best time to capture the beauty of the transition of day to night.”
“You know what else is beautiful?”
He turned on his heel, tilting his head. “What?”
“Freedom.”
“Ah.” He nodded in understanding. “I cannot let you out of here, I am afraid. It is up to Freya when you leave.”
“You’re just okay with her doing this?”
“I love her,” he said simply, as if it were the answer to everything.
I admired his many paintings of sunsets and mountains, of skulls, roses, gunshot wounds somehow painted to appear pretty, and a variety of poses of Freya. Some captured parts of her face under different lightings. “The wound.” I pointed at the painting of the hole in a shoulder, where blood-spattered paint dripped down into a rose. “Was that what I did?”
He nodded. “I paint all parts of my life. Even the ugly,” he explained. “Then I make it look beautiful.”
I stepped in front of his current piece on the easel. The paint was barely dry. “Is that me?” I could feel the blood drain from my face as I stared at an oil painting of myself lying on the ground outside the mansion, blood pooling from under my head. A shattered vase lay around me, its shards pointing inward. “Wait, you were the one who hit me.”
“Yes.” He hid nothing in his expression. Pain tore through his forced smile.
“Why?” I sighed. “Let me guess, love? Or revenge for shooting you?”
“Because Freya asked me to, but let’s call us even now.”
My anger bubbled under the surface. “I shot you because you were threatening my friend. You knocked me out to kidnap me. Those are two totally different scenarios,” I growled, then grabbed the painting he’d done of me. I ran my hand along the paint until the colors ran into each other. I waited for him to react, but he just stood, watching.
“You’re insane.”
I could have laughed if it wasn’t so damn ironic. “Me? You do realize you’re in love with a psycho who eats people.”
He placed a finger in the air as if to stop me. “She eats souls. Not them. Although, sometimes she will eat their hearts, but rarely.”
“You do hear yourself, right?” I laughed sardonically. “Am I trapped in an alternate reality where this is normal?”
He shook his head, shoving his hands into his deep pockets, and walked to the painting I ruined. “I can still fix it.”
“You.” I pointed at him with bulging eyes. “You are the insane one, for the record.”
I watched Freya hunt from the window. It was quite mesmerizing, watching her catch deer and rabbits with her bare hands as she hid among shadows, slipping between them with ease. It was a beautiful place. The house was built high up in the trees, on tall trunks of cut-down trees. It looked like it belonged to the forest.
It had been days since I’d arrived, and no one had come to save me. Freya and Alexander had spent the evenings discussing what they were going to do. I tried to do a magic quill, but nothing sent. My magic didn’t work here. Alexander must have been blocking it. If I were a little colder hearted, I’d have killed him while Freya was out and left the house, but I wasn’t like her. And as much as Alexander was a part of this, there was something about him that stopped me, a madness deep in his eyes, but soft, not dangerous. Like he didn’t understand everything happening. It was as if the lines of reality and fantasy had blurred somewhere between paintings.
“She’s hunting your dinner,” he explained when he entered the room I had been assigned. My window was much smaller than theirs, but at least I could look out to freedom.
I scrunched my nose. “I’m not eating rabbit or deer.”
“There’s no menu,” he explained gently as if I truly believed there were. “It’s that or starve, I am afraid.”
“What’s the plan then?” I asked, changing the subject. “How exactly do you plan on killing Raiden?”
He tilted his head. “Raiden?”
“I assume you’ll be wanting to take his place?”
“No. Freya has chosen Aziel’s body for mine. Lucius will take care of the other two.”
