The gallery was quiet again.
The wine glasses were gone. The eyes, the chatter, the careful flirtations — all vanished like ghosts after the storm. Just white walls, and her soul still clinging to them in oil and canvas.
Isabelle unlocked the door alone, the key still cold from lack of use. She hadn't been back since the night of the show. Since Nathan's wide-eyed apology and Elijah's heat-tinged stare.
She didn't know why she came. Maybe to see the red painting one last time before she sold it. Maybe to breathe without interruption.
But something was off the moment she walked in.
Not wrong.
Just... different.
A faint scent lingered in the room — familiar, clean. Like cedar and paint thinner. Elijah.
Her brows furrowed. He hadn't asked for another showing. He hadn't texted since the gallery. Maybe he'd given up.
Or maybe he'd done something else entirely.
She moved past the framed pieces — until she saw it.
In the backroom, where the unfinished works were stored, a canvas sat alone on the easel.
One she hadn't painted.
Not hers.
It was him.
His style.
Raw, dark, sensual.
Her body.
The painting was her — unmistakably her — but not naked in the obvious way. No breasts. No lips. No overt sensuality.
Just her back again.
Arched in movement.
A strand of hair clinging to the sweat of her neck.
The subtle parting of her thighs.
A bruise-colored shadow under her shoulder blade, like a bite too gentle to scar but too honest to forget.
It wasn't erotic.
It was possession.
Isabelle's breath hitched.
He had painted her.
Not as he wanted her.
But as he saw her.
Too vividly. Too intimately. Too… much.
There was a note on the floor.
She picked it up with shaking hands.
> "This is how you looked when you said 'not yet.'
And I still haven't painted what came after.
Yours if you want it. Burn it if you don't.
I already did — in my head.
— E."
---
She sat on the floor, note in hand, pulse echoing.
This wasn't a threat.
This wasn't an apology.
It was a confession.
And a challenge.
Elijah had always known how to push her — not toward him, but toward herself. But this felt... different. Not just encouragement. Not just admiration.
This was Elijah reminding her he could still undo her if she let him.
And God help her, she wanted to let him.
She closed her eyes.
Saw his hands — rough, stained, sure.
Saw his mouth — teasing, cruel, reverent.
Saw herself, folded into him like pages in a story they never finished.
But when she opened her eyes again, she wasn't folded.
She was standing.
---
She lifted the painting off the easel and carried it out into the gallery, to the front wall where the red painting had once hung.
She placed Elijah's work there.
Right in the center.
And she left the note beside it, uncensored.
Then she wrote a new title on the placard beneath the frame:
"The Moment Before Ruin."
And below that:
Not for sale.
---
Later that night, Camille called.
"You're up late," she said gently.
Isabelle stared at the painting through the gallery's glass front, the city lights casting soft gold across the floor.
"Elijah left something for me," she said.
Camille's silence was immediate. Then: "Are you okay?"
Isabelle smiled faintly. "Too okay. That's the problem."
"What did he leave?"
"A painting. Of me. From memory."
"And?"
"It's not love. It's not lust. It's… something else. Something that could devour me."
"Do you want to be devoured?" Camille asked, voice kind, not judging.
Isabelle thought about it.
She could feel the ache low in her belly. The curl of memory in her hips. The way his voice still lived behind her ear.
"Yes," she whispered. "But not without power."
---
That night, Isabelle went home.
She didn't text Elijah.
She didn't burn the note.
She hung it in her kitchen with a magnet.
And below it, she wrote on the whiteboard:
> "Paint me again.
But this time, I'll be watching."