The scent of turpentine and linseed oil, usually a comfort, felt sharp and accusatory in the air of Leo’s studio. I stood just inside the doorway, the unfinished cityscape on his canvas a chaotic mirror of the turmoil inside me. He wasn’t painting. He was just… waiting, as if he’d known the exact moment the tectonic plates of our carefully constructed world would begin to grind.“You moved,” I said. The words were stones dropped into a still pond.“Yes.”His confirmation was a clean, surgical cut. There was no warmth in it, no attempt to soften the blow. It was a statement of fact, and that, more than anything, chilled me.“How far?”“Far enough.”The silence that followed was a living thing, thick with everything unsaid. I could see the calculations behind his eyes, the cold logic that had assessed the threat—Daniel’s encroaching power, the gallery’s wavering loyalty—and executed a counter-strategy. He hadn’t nudged. He hadn’t suggested. He had reached into the machinery of my profes
Last Updated : 2026-04-25
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