I didn't see it coming.

That's the part that stays with me afterward. Not the pain—the surprise. Three years of marriage and I had never once seen Arian Perkins raise his hand. I'd catalogued every version of his cruelty: the silence at dinner, the empty chair beside me at my parents' gallery openings, the way he looked through me like I was a smudge on glass. But not this.

His palm connected with my cheek so hard the room tilted. I stumbled backward, hit the edge of the coffee table, and went down. The portfolio went with me—my father's sketches fanning out across the marble floor like scattered feathers. His handwriting face-up. His pencil annotations catching the light.

I sat there for a moment, my palm pressed flat against the cold tile, and I looked at those sketches. My father's careful notes in the margins. *Curve here—let light breathe through.* His whole mind, right there on the floor, stepped over by the man who owned the house.

Because that's what Arian did. He stepped over them. He didn't look down. He crossed the room and wrapped an arm around Catalina's shaking shoulders, and she turned her face into his chest like she'd been doing it her whole life.

Maybe she had.

'Leave,' he said. Still not looking at me. 'And don't come back.'

His voice was flat. Calm. The voice of a man closing a meeting.

Catalina's crying had already softened into quiet, elegant sniffles. She peeked at me over his shoulder—just once, just for a second—and in that second her eyes were completely dry.

I gathered my father's sketches off the floor. I took my time. I smoothed each page, stacked them in order, slid them back into the portfolio. My hands were steady. I don't know how. Some part of me had already gone somewhere very quiet and cold, and from that place, the shaking didn't reach.

I walked out without a word.

---

She called three days later.

The number was unfamiliar, but the voice was Arian's assistant—polite, efficient, brief. Ms. Torres had arranged for some of Mr. Wells' personal effects to be collected from a secondary property in New Jersey. Would I be available Thursday?

I stood at my kitchen window and looked out at the gray Brooklyn rooftops and thought about my father's tools. His notebooks. The small things he kept in his pockets—the folded sketches, the worn tape measure he'd carried since before I was born. Things that weren't the sculpture. Things that were just him.

I said yes.

I knew, somewhere beneath the wanting, that it was probably a mistake. But the wanting was louder. It always was, when it came to anything that had been his.

---

The New Jersey property was forty minutes outside the city—a low, unremarkable building set back from a county road, surrounded by scrubby trees that had already dropped their leaves. November had stripped everything bare. The sky was the same pewter gray it had been the morning my parents died.

I noticed that. I noticed it and kept driving anyway.

There was a woman waiting at the door—not Catalina, not anyone I recognized. She smiled and led me inside without much conversation, down a hallway that smelled of industrial cleaner and something older underneath it, something damp.

'Ms. Torres will be just a moment,' she said, and then she wasn't there anymore.

I stood in a small room off the hallway. There was a table. Two chairs. A single overhead light. No boxes. No personal effects. No trace of anything that had belonged to my father.

The door clicked behind me.

I turned around. Catalina stood in the doorway, and she wasn't crying now. She wasn't performing anything. She looked at me the way she'd looked at my father's sketches on the floor of the estate—like she was appraising something she'd already decided to take.

'Sit down, Sloane,' she said.

I didn't sit. 'Where are my father's things?'

'There are no things.' She stepped into the room. Behind her, two men I'd never seen followed. 'There's just a document I need you to sign. A statement confirming that you have no claim to any work currently attributed to me.'

The chair in the corner wasn't a regular chair. I saw that now. The wrist straps. The small black box on the side table.

My chest went very still.

'Catalina—'

'You came here alone,' she said, almost gently. 'That was your choice. I gave you a way out at the estate. You could have left quietly.' She tilted her head. 'You didn't.'

I looked at the door. I looked at the two men. I looked at the chair.

And I understood, with a clarity that felt almost like calm, that no one was coming.

Not Arian. Not anyone.

I was completely, entirely alone—and the woman standing in front of me had already decided what happened next.

The electricity isn't loud. That's the thing no one tells you.

It doesn't roar. It doesn't announce itself. It just arrives—a white, total seizure that starts at my temples and swallows everything. My jaw locks. My spine arcs. And then it stops, and I'm back in the chair, and the room is exactly as it was, and Catalina is still standing in front of me holding the pen.

'Sign it, Sloane.'

Her voice is patient. Almost kind. Like she's asking me to initial a lease.

I don't answer. My mouth tastes like copper. The wrist straps have cut into my skin and I can feel the raw edges every time I breathe, but I keep my hands still. I keep my hands still because if I move them she'll know how badly they're shaking.

The document sits on the table beside her. Two pages. Clean margins. My name printed at the bottom in neat black type, with a line waiting beneath it. *I, Sloane Wells, hereby relinquish all claims—*

I looked at it the first time. I won't look at it again.

'You're only making this harder on yourself.' Catalina sets the pen down and nods at the man behind me. 'He had a gift. I can see that. But he's gone, Sloane. The work exists now. It belongs to whoever can carry it forward.'

I press my palm flat against my sternum—the only movement the straps allow—and feel my heart still beating there. Uneven. Stubborn.

'It's his,' I say. My voice comes out wrong, scraped and thin. 'It will always be his.'

She looks at me for a long moment. Her expression doesn't change.

'Again,' she says.

---

I don't know how much time passes. The overhead light stays the same. The room stays the same. At some point I stop counting the sessions and just focus on the small fragment of stone in my coat pocket—I can feel it pressing against my hip through the fabric. My father's stone. I hold onto that.

Then I hear footsteps on the stairs.

The door opens.

Arian fills the frame. His eyes sweep the room—the chair, the equipment, the straps at my wrists, my face. I watch him take it in. I watch something move behind his eyes, something that looks almost like horror.

*Here*, I think. *Here is where it ends.*

Then Catalina is beside him.

I don't see her cross the room. One moment she's near the table, the next she's at his arm, and she's crying—the real-looking kind, the kind she produces the way other people breathe—and her voice is low and urgent and I can only catch pieces of it. *Broke in. Attacked me. I didn't know what else to do. I was so scared, Arian.*

He looks at her. Then he looks at me.

I am still in the chair. The burns at my temples are raw. My wrists are bleeding where the straps cut in. I am barely conscious and I am looking directly at him and I think: *He knows. He has to know.*

His jaw tightens. Something closes behind his eyes.

'Vicious,' he says. His voice is flat and certain. 'She's always been obsessive. I should have seen it sooner.'

The word lands somewhere past pain. Past anything I have a name for.

He crosses the room and unstraps my wrists. His hands are efficient. Not gentle, not rough—just efficient, the way he does everything. He pulls me up by the arm and I don't have the strength to resist and I don't try.

Catalina watches us go. At the door, I look back at her once.

Her eyes are dry.

---

He doesn't speak in the car. Neither do I.

I watch the city lights thin out through the passenger window. The highway becomes a county road. The county road becomes something darker, lined with bare trees that reach across the headlights like fingers.

I know where we are before he stops the car.

The cemetery gates are iron, old, left unlocked after visiting hours. He pulls up to the entrance and cuts the engine. Gets out. Opens my door. I don't move, so he takes my arm again and walks me to the nearest bench—stone, cold, set just inside the gate.

He sets me down.

I look up at him. I want to say something. I don't know what. Something true, something final, something that would make him understand what he has just done.

He doesn't look at me.

He walks back to the car, gets in, and drives away.

I watch the taillights until they disappear around the bend. Then there is nothing—just the dark, and the cold, and the silence of the dead around me. My parents are here, somewhere past the tree line. Two weeks in the ground.

I press my hand against my sternum again.

Still beating.

I sit in the November dark with the burns at my temples and my father's stone in my pocket, and I make a decision so quiet it barely sounds like anything at all.

No more.

Not one more word. Not one more tear. Not one more single thing given to people who will only ever take.

The cold settles in around me like a second skin, and I let it. I let it because I know something Arian doesn't know yet.

I am going to survive this night.

And then I am going to burn everything down.