He wanted ruin, so I painted him a symphony of decay.
For two days, his command echoed in the sterile silence of my cage. Show me the ruin, Elara. Or I will create it for you. It was a taunt, a challenge, a psychological knife twisted in a wound he knew was already there. The blank canvas on the easel stared back at me, a vast, white expanse of judgment. I'd tried to paint something beautiful, something serene, a lie to prove I was untouched by him. The results were insipid, soulless smears of colour that made me want to gag.
He had seen right through me. He knew the only thing I had left was my anger.
So, on the third day, I stopped fighting it. I let the fury in.
It started as a low hum in my veins, a memory of his condescending smirk, the way his presence sucked all the air from the room. I thought of my father, a broken man haunted by ghosts I didn't understand, and how Lysander Blackwood used that as a weapon against me. I thought of Jenna's worried eyes, of the eviction notice, of the sheer, gut-wrenching desperation that had forced my hand to sign his contract.
The hum became a roar.
I didn't reach for a brush. I went for the tools of destruction. A trowel. A palette knife. A blowtorch. I grabbed a large, raw piece of canvas and tacked it directly to the wall, rejecting the orderliness of the easel. I mixed paints not with medium, but with grit, sand, and shattered pieces of my own discarded pottery. The first slash of colour wasn't a colour at all—it was a violent, black gash down the center, thick and tar-like.
I worked in a frenzy, a silent scream translated into physical action. I wasn't painting a scene; I was building a landscape of my rage. I used the trowel to heap mounds of crimson and burnt umber, like raw, exposed flesh. I scorched sections with the blowtorch, the acrid smell of burning linen and paint filling the air, a scent of pure catharsis. I embedded shards of pottery, their sharp edges glinting, representing the broken pieces of my life he was so fond of cataloguing.
It was ugly. It was brutal. It was the most honest thing I had created in years.
I lost track of time, covered in sweat and paint, my muscles aching. When I finally stepped back, my chest heaving, the sight of it stole my breath. It was a chaotic, beautiful nightmare. A depiction of a soul eviscerated. It was ruin, all right. My ruin. And it was magnificent.
I didn't hear him enter. I never did. One moment I was alone in the aftermath of my emotional storm, the next, the air pressure in the room shifted, growing dense and heavy. I turned, my heart lurching into my throat.
Lysander stood just inside the doorway, his gaze locked on the painting. He was once again in his uniform of power—a dark, impeccably tailored suit—but his posture was different. The usual cool detachment was gone. He was utterly still, his focus absolute. He didn't look at me, didn't speak. He just… absorbed it.
His eyes traced the violent strokes, the scorch marks, the treacherous texture. I saw his throat work as he swallowed. A long, tense minute stretched into two. The silence was a living thing, throbbing with the aftermath of my creation.
"Finally," he said, his voice low, stripped of its usual mocking edge. It was almost a reverence.
The sound broke the spell. Defensiveness surged back. "Happy now?" I spat, gesturing wildly at the canvas. "Is this ruined enough for you? Is this the spectacle you were hoping for?"
He ignored my tone, his eyes still devouring the painting. "It's not a spectacle. It's a confession." He finally turned his head, and the intensity in his grey eyes was staggering. It wasn't the look of a man who had broken his toy. It was the look of a man who had just discovered his toy was far more complex, and far more dangerous, than he'd ever imagined. "I knew you had this in you. I just didn't know you'd dare to let it out."
He took a step forward, then another, until he was standing beside me, both of us facing the violent expanse of my work. His proximity was a brand. I could feel the heat from his body, smell the clean, expensive scent of his soap beneath the aroma of paint and fire.
"This," he murmured, his voice a rough caress against the shell of my ear, "this is what I paid for."
His words should have felt like a violation. Instead, they felt like a victory. He hadn't crushed me. I had shown him the abyss, and for the first time, he seemed… captivated.
His gaze fell to the palette knife I was still clutching in my paint-stained hand, my knuckles white around the handle. "You're holding it like a weapon," he observed.
"It is a weapon," I retorted, my voice trembling.
"No." The word was soft, but absolute. "It's a tool. You're choking it. You'll tire your hand, and you'll lose your precision."
Before I could process what was happening, he moved behind me. His front brushed against my back, a solid, warm wall. His left hand came around to rest on my hip, a shock of contact that seared through the thin fabric of my t-shirt. I gasped, frozen.
"Relax," he commanded, his breath stirring my hair.
His right hand closed over mine on the palette knife's handle. His touch was not gentle; it was firm, assured, rearranging my frantic grip into something more efficient, more controlled. His fingers were long and strong, completely enveloping my paint-smeared ones. A jolt, pure and electric, shot up my arm, spreading through my entire body, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. My breath hitched. Every nerve ending was screaming, hyper-aware of the hard planes of his body against my back, the possessive spread of his hand on my hip, the intimate cage of his fingers around mine.
It was unsettling. It was terrifying.
It was the most alive I had felt in years.
We stood like that for a heart-stopping moment, fused together before the painting, his hand guiding mine. The world had narrowed to this point of contact, to the scent of him, to the shared heat that threatened to incinerate us both. I could feel the rapid, heavy thud of his heart against my back, a rhythm that matched my own frantic pulse. The monster wasn't just in front of the canvas; he was wrapped around me, and a treacherous, shameful part of me never wanted him to let go.
He was the one who broke. His grip on my hand loosened. His fingers slipped from mine, the loss of contact feeling like a sudden, cold void. The hand on my hip fell away, and he took a deliberate step back, putting a foot of devastating space between us.
The spell shattered. I stumbled forward a step, my legs unsteady, my heart hammering against my ribs like a wild thing. I turned to face him, my cheeks flushed, my lips parted in a silent gasp.
He was staring at his own hand as if it had betrayed him, his chest rising and falling with a rhythm that was just a fraction too quick. When his eyes lifted to mine, the grey was stormy, turbulent with something I couldn't name — confusion, frustration, a dawning, unwanted hunger. The controlled billionaire was gone, replaced by a man who had just been as shaken as I was.
His voice, when it came, was rough, scraped raw from some internal battle.
"Now we're getting somewhere."