Chương 2
“You don’t have the leverage you think you have,” he said. “Your name is on the report. Your signature is beneath the attribution. If that painting becomes a forgery, it becomes your forgery before it becomes mine.”
Elena pressed the cloud control.
For one terrible second nothing changed.
The apartment’s wireless network had been unstable all evening. Guests had complained downstairs about calls dropping near the east gallery. Marcus had laughed and blamed the age of the building.
The cloud symbol rotated.
Elena stared at him because she could not bear to look at the phone.
“You switched the canvas,” she said.
Vivienne stopped turning her glass.
Marcus did not move.
Elena heard the quiet drag of her own breath. “After I examined it.”
“That’s an accusation,” Marcus said.
“It’s what happened.”
“You authenticated the painting.”
“I authenticated a painting.”
The cloud symbol continued rotating beneath her finger.
Marcus looked toward Vivienne, not for permission, but to judge whether Elena’s wording had unsettled her. Vivienne’s faint smile remained, though her glass had lowered an inch.
“You should be very careful,” Marcus said. “You’re not in a condition to survive another mistake.”
The symbol changed.
A small green confirmation icon glowed through the cracked glass.
Elena closed her eyes.
Her relief came so hard it resembled dizziness. She allowed her shoulders to loosen and her hand to fall beside the phone. The movement made Marcus stand.
“She’s fading,” Vivienne said.
“No,” Marcus replied. “She’s performing.”
Elena waited.
Three seconds.
Four.
She opened her eyes only slightly. The green icon remained. She looked at it, then at Marcus’s blurred shape above her, and felt the corner of her injured mouth rise by the smallest possible degree.
It was not triumph.
It was the first decision of the night that still belonged entirely to her.
Marcus saw the movement.
“What was that?”
Elena let her face empty again.
He crouched quickly now. His gaze moved across her eyes, her mouth, the hand near her abdomen. It did not reach the phone.
“What did you do?”
She remained still.
Vivienne walked nearer, the thin heels making soft, precise taps against the wood. “She smiled.”
“I saw.”
“Perhaps she finds you funny.”
Marcus turned his head. “Not now.”
Vivienne’s amusement vanished. Not dramatically. Her mouth simply became a line.
Elena listened to their irritation and understood something she should have noticed hours earlier: they were not united. They were standing on the same side of a crime, but not on the same ground.
Marcus took Elena’s chin between two fingers. He avoided the cut on her lip, not from compassion but because he disliked blood on his hands.
“What did you do?” he asked again.
Her vision narrowed around his face. She could smell champagne on his breath, though he had not held a glass since the preview began. He had been drinking somewhere private.
“I believed you,” she whispered.
His fingers tightened.
“About what?”
“That I don’t have leverage.”
He studied her for a moment, searching for the trap.
Then a chime sounded from the phone.
Small. Electronic. Almost delicate.
All three of them looked down.
The green icon shone beneath the branching cracks.
Marcus released her chin and snatched the phone from the floor.
“What is this?”
Elena’s hand curled against her abdomen. The baby had gone still.
Marcus tapped the screen. The upload confirmation disappeared behind the lock display. He pressed the side button, then tried again, his control thinning with each failed attempt.
Vivienne leaned close enough to see. “Is it recording?”
“It was.”
“Where did it send?”
Marcus looked at Elena.
The first honest fear of the evening appeared in his eyes.
He stood and flung the phone against the carved bedpost.
The screen shattered inward. A section of black glass spun beneath the bedside table.
Elena flinched despite herself.
Marcus picked up the damaged phone and struck it again, this time against the floor. The case split. The display went dark.
Vivienne watched him with an expression Elena had never seen on her before. It was not horror at the violence. It was calculation stripped of elegance.
“That doesn’t remove an upload,” Vivienne said.
Marcus breathed through his nose.
“You know that,” she added.
He turned toward her. “Be quiet.”
“Where did she send it?”
“I said be quiet.”
Vivienne’s gaze moved to Elena, and for the first time that night, the amusement did not return. “Who has it?”
Elena closed her eyes again.
Marcus crossed the room in two steps and gripped the front of her dress near the shoulder. “Answer her.”
Pain spread across Elena’s ribs as he pulled her partly upright. Her head hung. Her hair came loose from the remains of its bun and covered one side of her face.
“Marcus,” Vivienne said.
He ignored her.
“Who has the recording?”
Elena’s mouth tasted of copper. “Enough people.”
It was a dangerous answer. She knew that as soon as she gave it. A frightened person might have named someone. A clever person would not. Marcus hated being reminded that she could still think.
He drew back his hand.
Vivienne caught his wrist.
It happened so quickly that for a second none of them seemed to understand it.
Her bracelet flashed between them.
“Not her face,” Vivienne said. “Not again.”
Marcus stared at her hand.
Vivienne released him first. She smoothed the side of her gown as though the contact had wrinkled it.
“The bruising is already visible,” she said. “If she leaves here looking worse, no one will care what she recorded. They’ll care why she looks like this.”
“She isn’t leaving.”
The words quieted the room.
Elena heard the muted hum of the building’s ventilation and, from far below, a brief rise of laughter from the last guests departing the preview. Somewhere in the penthouse, a door closed. The world continued beyond the bedroom with no idea that a decision had just been spoken aloud inside it.
May you like
Vivienne took a drink.
“That creates other complications,” she said.
