One of the smaller paintings that I hadn’t noticed that first night caught my eye. The painting was stylized, abstract enough that you couldn’t tell right away what the image was.
I had to step closer, almost put my nose up to it, to tell what the painter was going for. It was a woman, or at least a curved body that I thought was a woman. The features of her face were blurred out so that I couldn’t see the expression. And her arms were strange, elongated, with lines extending from the ends of her hands. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, until…
There.
When I saw it, I took a step back in surprise. I hadn’t recognized the shape because of the lines, but I knew now exactly what they were. The silver lines emanating from the palms, looking for all the world like energy beams coming out of a superhero’s hands—they weren’t lines at all.
They were chains.
The woman was tied up in the room that Jake had tied me up in. And again, I winced with jealousy. This was obviously a painting that Jake had either done himself or had commissioned, with a model who’d been in the same position I’d been in all last night. I frowned and turned away to look at another Kage painting.
Man, there were a lot of them.
The Kage paintings were just as prominent as ever. Indeed, the canvas that I’d been looking at the night of the party had a spotlight all to itself. It shone in the middle of the room.
At first I’d thought it had been a reproduction of one of Kage’s pieces. A giclee print, maybe, like the kind you see hanging all over high-end galleries in the West End. But as I came closer, I realized that this wasn’t a print. It was an original.
The paint was applied in thick strokes. I reached out to touch it. The drips were bumpy on the canvas. I squinted at the dripped paint. How had Jake managed to get this? How had he even gotten in contact with the most infamous street artist in New York City?
I turned away from the canvas. Jake Carville was a man full of mysteries. But there was one thing I knew: he had an art studio full of blank canvases, and I meant to paint them.
Chapter Five
It was six o’clock in the evening when Jake came back. I was in the art studio, busy with my painting. I’d managed to finish thirteen pieces. Two others were pushed to the side, half-done. They irritated me like I was a kid with a loose tooth ready to come out. I tongued them but couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the idea in my head. They weren’t quite right.
I was busy working on my fourteenth canvas when Jake arrived.
“What did you eat for lunch?”
“Lunch? Oh, right,” I said. I looked out the window, where the sky was growing darker. “Lunch. What time is it?”
“It’s dinnertime.”
“Oh. Dang. Well, I got distracted.” I dabbed another bit of blue onto the canvas. Not quite there, but close. I dabbed again.
“I can see that,” Jake said.
“I’ll be out in a sec,” I said, dabbing again with a lighter tint of blue. “I need to finish—”
“Your painting? You’ve finished a lot of them already, I see.”
Before I could protest, he stepped into the room. He moved among my paintings, studying them. Distracted, I swished my brush in the water to clean it. I could finish this painting later. Now…
Now, Jake was seeing my work.
I found myself holding my breath, hoping that he would say something about them to me. Even if he hated them… I wanted to know. I don’t know why. He had good taste, I suppose, or similar taste. I wanted to know if he approved, or if he thought I was wasting his paint and his canvases.
I’d wasted a heck of a lot of them, after all.
“Would you like to go out to eat?” he asked, turning abruptly on his heel.
My shoulders slumped. The dark dread that had been building inside of me as he went from painting to painting descended on my head.
“What is it?” he asked. He tilted his head curiously at me. I sighed and gestured toward the canvases he had just looked at.
“Do you… I mean… what do you think?”
“I think you should have eaten lunch six hours ago.”
“No,” I said, hating the whining tone slipping into my voice. “I mean the paintings.”
Jake couldn’t hide the small smile at the corner of his lips.
“Do you care what I think about them?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You shouldn’t.”
My lips parted in surprise.
“Why… why not?”
Jake squatted down in front of one of the canvases. He tilted it back so that the light hit it. Immediately I saw a line that I wanted to change, and winced. Seeing me, he put the canvas down. He shook his head. I didn’t know why, but I thought he looked at me with something like pity. Then it was gone as quickly as it had come. He stood up and held his arms open wide.