Micah moved.
That was the only mercy—a convulsion of muscle and bone, sharp and unthinking, before the creeping tendrils of terror could root him to the floorboards.
The canvas was the first thing his desperate fingers found, digging into the wooden stretcher with a force that threatened to splinter the seasoned pine, hard enough to leave crescent moons of pain in his flesh. He dragged it away from the mattress, the friction a raw rasp against the floor, nearly tripping over his own suddenly leaden feet. Breath clawed its way up his throat, shallow and ragged. The word MINE seemed to pulse in the meager light, a wet, glistening obscenity, as if it had been scrawled in fresh blood mere moments ago instead of hours—or worse, with a perverse, meticulous care he couldn't recall possessing, a memory swallowed by the abyss of sleep.
"No," he whispered, then again, louder, the sound tearing from his chest, as if sheer volume might somehow shred the truth of it, dissolve the ink from the linen.
He shoved the painting behind a leaning, precarious tower of blank canvases, their clean, untouched linen a fragile, almost mocking defense against the encroaching madness. He stacked them hastily, hands slipping on the still-damp paint, the viscous red and black smearing along the pristine edges, a bloody fingerprint on an otherwise unblemished surface. When he stepped back, it looked hidden enough. Buried.
Gone.
A shallow grave.
It didn't help.
The image stayed, burned perfect and unaltered behind the fragile membranes of his eyes. Lucien's expression—too knowing, too still, a predator's calm—hovered there no matter where Micah looked, a phantom limb of vision. The word followed, heavy as a brand seared onto his very soul.
MINE.
Micah swore, a guttural sound torn from his depths, and turned back, a spike of pure, incandescent rage lancing through the icy fear like a live wire sparking in the dark.
Hiding wasn't enough. Burial was a temporary reprieve, not an exorcism.
He snatched a utility knife from his worktable, the blade snapping out with a violent, satisfying click. The sound felt good—decisive, a clean break. Real. He dragged the canvas free again, its sudden reappearance a malevolent taunt, and carved into the taut linen with brutal, sawing strokes, each motion a desperate attempt to sever the connection, to erase the damning truth. The fabric split, tore, screamed softly under the cold steel, a sound like a tortured breath. The face fractured, Lucien's eye sliced clean through, the mouth reduced to ragged, weeping strips of cloth, a silent, gaping wound.
Micah didn't stop until his hands were shaking so violently he could barely hold the knife, until the canvas hung in useless, tattered shreds from the frame, a defeated banner of his own unraveling.
His chest heaved, each breath a painful labor. Sweat pricked along his spine, cold and clammy.
For a moment—a single, fragile moment, delicate as a moth's wing—he felt relief, a cleansing emptiness.
Then he closed his eyes.
Lucien was still there.
Unbroken.
Whole.
Watching.
Micah made a sound low in his throat, a choked sob of pure despair, and staggered back, the disgust curdling into something sickeningly close to outright panic. He wrenched the ruined canvas free from the wood, balled it up with frantic, desperate energy, and shoved it into the small metal bin he used for solvent rags. His hands moved on instinct, a desperate, animalistic drive for annihilation, as he doused it with alcohol, the sharp, chemical stench biting at his eyes, burning his nostrils.
He lit it.
The flame caught fast, a greedy, hungry thing, bright and terrible, curling the linen into blackened, brittle petals. Smoke rose, thick and acrid, clawing at his lungs, a bitter taste on his tongue. Micah stood over it, trembling, watching with morbid fascination until the fire died down to glowing embers and ash, a final, smoldering ruin.
"Gone," he told himself. "Destroyed."
His stomach twisted, a knot of visceral unease. The knowledge lingered anyway, quiet and patient, tucked into the darkest recesses of his mind like a predator that knew it had all the time in the world, its shadow lengthening over his fragile sense of self.
Micah turned away from the bin, the scent of ash and burnt canvas clinging to him like a shroud, and scrubbed his hands over his face, smearing paint further across his skin. He felt filthy. Marked. Like he'd woken up inside the aftermath of a crime he couldn't remember committing but somehow knew, with an awful certainty, that he was utterly, irrevocably guilty.
The bathroom, a sterile, tiled cell, became his refuge—and his confessional.
He cranked the shower as hot as it would go, the pipes groaning in protest, and stepped under the scalding deluge without hesitation, hissing as the water hit his skin, a burning penance. Steam filled the small space, thick and suffocating, fogging the mirror, blurring his reflection into something mercifully indistinct, a ghost of himself.
He scrubbed.
Soap. Fingernails, sharp and unforgiving. A washcloth, dragged harshly over his arms, his chest, his thighs, as if he could scour away the very memory of the night. Red spiraled down the drain in thin, diluted streams, followed by gray, then black, a swirling vortex of grime and unspoken sin. His skin flushed raw beneath the inferno, pale turning pink, then an angry, mottled red, a map of his self-inflicted wounds.
"Get it off," he muttered, breath hitching, the words torn from him like a prayer. "Get it off."
The sensation from the night before—the phantom sting, the lingering ache, a spectral touch—flared under the scalding water, sharper now, like his nerves had been laid bare, exposed to the elements. He scrubbed harder, teeth clenched, until his hands ached and his skin burned with a fire that seemed to consume him from within.
A knock sounded.
Micah froze, every muscle locking into place. The sound was solid. Real. Not a figment of his unraveling mind. Three firm raps against the studio door, echoing through the small space like a gunshot, shattering the fragile peace of his self-flagellation.
His heart slammed against his ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone.
Another knock, patient. Expectant. A predator's calm.
Micah fumbled to shut off the water, the sudden silence deafening, his lungs burning as if he'd been submerged too long, held beneath the dark current of his own fear. He grabbed a towel, wrapped it around his waist with clumsy urgency, and staggered out of the bathroom, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the studio floor, each one a stark, damning declaration.
The door loomed, a dark, impassable barrier.
Locked. Still locked.
Good.
He swallowed, his throat dry and tight, and crossed the room, every step heavy, his pulse roaring in his ears, a frantic drumbeat against the impending doom. He cracked the door open just enough to see who waited on the other side, a sliver of light illuminating a sliver of dread.
Lucien stood there.
Clean. Composed. Entirely, devastatingly real. A nightmare made flesh.
He wore a neutral-colored coat, dark hair neatly in place, an expression open and—infuriatingly—pleasant. In his hands, he held a cardboard tray with two coffees, their warmth a cruel domesticity, and a small paper bag folded at the top, promising sustenance. The scent of roasted beans and warm bread drifted in, an anchor in the storm, grounding and surreal all at once.
"Morning," Lucien said lightly, his voice a silken caress, his eyes flicking—not lingering, but noticing—Micah's damp hair, the haphazard towel, the faint, angry redness of his skin. "Hope this isn't too early."
Micah stared at him, water dripping from his lashes, blurring the edges of a world already spinning, his mind a white-noise blur, a static-filled void where sanity had once resided.
"I—" The word grated, a splinter of sound in the sudden, suffocating quiet. He swallowed, the rough rasp of his throat an echo of the tremor in his hands. "What are you doing here?"
Lucien lifted the tray, a gesture both innocent and knowing, as if its presence alone were explanation enough. "You left the gallery in a hurry last night. Elias mentioned you practically live here." A pause, perfectly weighted, polite as a surgeon's incision. "I thought I'd check in. Bring coffee. Breakfast." His gaze flickered to the paper bag, a silent offering. "Bagels. There were wraps too, but I guessed."
Micah's fingers, cold and bloodless, clawed at the damp edge of the towel wrapped precariously around his waist. Every nerve ending screamed to flee—to slam the door with a violence that would rattle his very bones, to bolt it, to dissolve into the thin air of the studio. But his body, a traitorous vessel, remained rooted, a moth drawn to a flame it knew would consume it. It never seemed to listen, not where Lucien was concerned.
"I didn't… I wasn't expecting—" He faltered, the words catching like burrs in his throat. He was acutely, painfully aware of his own raw vulnerability: half-naked, skin flushed with a heat that was not from the steam, eyes rimmed a sickly red from both the shower's heat and the cold grip of panic. Exposed. Flayed.
Lucien's gaze, a mercury-silver thing, softened by a fraction, a barely perceptible shift that felt more like a tightening of a snare. "I can go," he said, the words smooth as polished bone. "If this is a bad time."
Behind Micah, the studio air hung thick and silent, heavy with unspoken things. The ash bin, a monument to spent fires, sat cooling, its metallic scent faint but persistent. The stacked canvases, blind and hungry, loomed like ancient, forgotten gods. And the knowledge, a venomous bloom, burned in his gut.
Micah hesitated—a beat of his heart, a whisper of a second, but it was enough. Enough for the moment to tip, irrevocably, past the point of no return.
"No," he said finally, the word a ragged breath. He stepped back, the movement stiff, and pulled the door wider, a silent invitation to the maw. His voice was hoarse, unsteady, a string stretched too tight. "It's… fine. Just—give me a second."
Lucien smiled then, a small, unreadable curve of his lips, a secret held close as a beating heart. And then he stepped inside, crossing the threshold with the quiet grace of a predator entering its chosen lair.
The door clicked shut behind him, a final, definitive sound, sealing them in.