I whispered, awed. “Kirkpatrick painted this.” I knew the careful hand, the unabashed celebration of textures rendered by a brushstroke so fine it erased the evidence of its own making. “This was the woman in Kirkpatrick’s painting.”
What I had read as judgment on our first meeting, had in fact, been surprise, in Kirkpatrick’s limited bandwidth of facial expressions. And perhaps distaste for the pale imitation of the savior he remembered.
“Yes,” Mark said. “She saved his life. That’s how I met him. In saving yours, he finally repaid the debt.”
My fingers floated out to trace the white curve of her face. The texture was glass-smooth under my fingertips, like a mirror reflecting the past rather than the present. “Is it true?” I asked. “Am I pretty much the genetic equivalent of microwaved Lily leftovers?”
Mark’s sigh was heavy enough to create a flurry of dust motes in the blue light of pre-dawn. “Hanna, I will give you the story you want. When I can.”
This wound was too old, too deep to avoid irritation. “Please,” I said, staring at my own face on a centuries old canvas. “Please don’t do this to me. Not again.”
Mark deliberately avoided looking at my face as well as the ghost of it captured in the gilded frame. “If I could tell you more, I would.”
Rage boiled in my belly. I turned back to the painting. For a brief moment, I felt the satisfying rip of stiffened canvas as I slashed her face to ribbons with the blade I didn’t have.
Who are you trying to hurt?
“Think about this, Hanna. For one minute. Listen to me.”
I half glanced over my shoulder. “What?”
“Look at the sheet. Pick it up.”
I did as bidden. The pattern of wear followed the jutting swirled and flowered recesses of the frame I had traced with my fingers. A sneeze erupted from my nose as a cloud of dust swirled out from the sheet. “But I saw this painting on a wall.” I said.
Mark smiled, pleased with my observation. “Correct.”
“Which means someone came up here, got the painting, hung it, took a picture, and put it back? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Indeed not,” he said.
“There are no footprints!” The realization came to me all at once as I scanned the area, seeing the trail of my skirt and the distinctive marks of my own bare feet.
“Who do you suppose could come up here, retrieve a painting, hang it on the wall, take a picture, and depart without leaving a single footprint?”
“Not a vampire,” I answered. “Or a werewolf. But a demigod...”
“They’re fucking with you, Hanna. And you’re letting them. I will tell you about her when I can. I’m not hiding some shrine of a secret love from you. Her painting has been here since Kirkpatrick gave it to me. The room you are staying in is the most secure in the castle. Yes, she stayed there. But so have many others.”
“Did you love her?” The question came from a place neither polite or practical.
Mark looked like he’d taken an uppercut to the gut. He’d been on a roll. He hadn’t expected this. At last, he looked not at me, but the painting. “Love isn’t a useful—”
“Did you love her?” I asked again, meeting his eyes, and refusing to look away.
If I had ever thought myself the victim of a broken heart before, I had surely missed the mark. For what I saw in Abernathy’s face at that exact moment buried an axe in my sternum. “Yes,” he said.
“Do you love me?” I would have given every sunset, every leaf wet with rain, every treasured experience in this life or any other to take those words back the second they left my mouth.
Abernathy’s jaw hardened, his eyes going cold and dark as tree bark. “I can’t,” he said.
A cold finality settled in my chest, shrinking my heart to a pebble lodged between my lungs. My nose stung, my eyes filling treacherously with tears. I bit the inside of cheek hard enough to taste copper on my tongue.
“You will always have my protection,” he said. “Whether you want it or not.”
“I know.” It was not a presumption, but an understanding. “I’ll stay on at the gallery through the wedding. There’s plenty of planning needed between now and then. But after that, it’s probably best that we—that I move on to something else.”
Mark nodded, offering me his arm. “I’ll take you back to your room.”
I looked at it, craving its warmth, his touch, more than I craved air,