Lena sat at her desk late into the evening, the city humming faintly outside her apartment window. The night was quiet except for the ticking of the clock on her wall, each second stretching longer than it should. She had been restless all day, her thoughts circling around things she hadn’t dared to revisit for months.
Finally, she reached for her laptop and typed his name, Damien Cross. She didn’t know what she expected to find. Maybe nothing. Maybe he had gone off the grid the way he always threatened he would. Maybe he had vanished into the corners of the art world where only whispers and collectors remembered him.
But when the page loaded, her breath caught. There it was, his latest painting.
The screen lit up with a canvas that pulled her right back into a storm she thought she had
