Without Your Persmission

Chapter 1: Permission Not Required

The gallery was louder than I'd anticipated. Not in volume, but in presence.

People didn't just look at the paintings—they leaned into them. Whispered about them like they were dangerous. It was flattering, I suppose. If I were someone who enjoyed attention. But I hadn't come here for that. I hadn't wanted to come at all.

"Fifteen minutes," I had told Gretta. "I'll show up, nod politely, and then vanish like a myth."

That had been forty minutes ago.

I stood off to the side, perfectly still, wrapped in the comfort of silence and shadow. The gallery lights were warm overhead, casting just enough glow on my skin to make me visible—but not inviting. People knew better than to approach. That was the gift of having a reputation.

They didn't know me, but they thought they did.

And I let them think it.

Aurora Quinn: the quiet storm.

The artist who painted longing like it hurt.

The woman whose canvases sold for more than some people made in a year.

I wasn't meek. I simply didn't speak unless I had to. Words were flimsy things. Paint was truer. More precise. And far more dangerous, in the right hands.

Gretta had begged me to be here. Said my absence would only "fuel the myth," but that sometimes people needed to see the creator behind the chaos. I relented, not for her, but for the pieces. They deserved to be seen outside the shadows I kept them in.

Devour Me in Silence hung across the room. It was the one I almost didn't bring.

Too raw. Too honest. The kind of work that left me trembling when I finished it. But Gretta insisted it was my masterpiece. She wasn't wrong.

I let my eyes scan the room. Wealth brushed against every wall—moneyed eyes and too-sharp suits, men who thought emotional art was a sign of sensitivity instead of the violence it really was.

That's when I saw him.

He stood like a fracture in the middle of the room—dark suit, darker gaze. Unsmiling. Surrounded by sycophants who angled their bodies toward him like sunflowers toward light. He didn't smile. Didn't speak. Barely nodded. He didn't need to.

Alistair Craven.

I recognized him immediately. Old money disguised as new ambition. A self-made predator in a curated shell. I'd read his name in a dozen profiles. His company portfolio was bloated with acquisitions and holdings. But none of those articles mentioned how still he was. How sharply he watched. How he could hold a room without touching it.

And he was staring.

Not at the men speaking to him. Not at their hands waving for his attention.

He was staring at my painting.

And then—at me.

I didn't move. I didn't need to. Our eyes met across the gallery, and for one unbearable second, something shifted in the air. Not recognition. Not attraction.

Fixation.

It bloomed like a bruise beneath my skin.

His expression didn't change, but I knew—he saw it. Not the art. Me.

Most people look at my work and think it's sadness. Loneliness. But he didn't look at Devour Me in Silence with sympathy. He looked at it like he'd lived inside it. Like he knew what it cost to create something like that and survive it.

And that—terrified me.

Because I knew what I was capable of when someone interested me. I didn't flirt. I studied. I could fall in love with the rhythm of someone's walk. The way they breathed when they were lying. I could learn them like I'd learn a landscape before painting it from memory. It wasn't romance.

It was consumption.

I didn't have crushes. I had fixations.

And I was smart enough to avoid them.

But this—this didn't feel avoidable.

I broke the gaze first. I had to. He was still surrounded, nodding absently to someone I didn't recognize. The perfect illusion of disinterest. But I knew better. His stillness had changed. Tensed. Just slightly.

I turned away, moving quietly past the guests and into the narrow hall that led to the private storage room. Somewhere unlit.

Somewhere unobserved. My heartbeat had shifted out of sync, out of rhythm. The silence I wore like armor cracked open for just a second, and all I could feel was the certainty pressing at the back of my neck:

I had seen him.

And worse—

He had seen me.

I shook my head slightly in an impending despair. I need to get out of here.

I have to.

The night air slapped against my face as soon as I stepped out of the gallery. Cold, sharp, blessedly quiet.

I didn't wait for Gretta to find me. She'd understand. She always did. Or maybe she didn't, but she let me vanish when I needed to, and that was enough. I walked home with my coat half-buttoned and my heels clicking over the wet pavement, the streetlights

bleeding halos across the sidewalk.

I didn't even bother turning the lights on when I got inside. Just dropped my keys, peeled off the black silk like it had been suffocating me, and stood barefoot in the middle of the kitchen like I'd forgotten what my own house was for.

But I hadn't. I knew exactly what I wanted. What I needed.

I grabbed my laptop.

There was no hesitation. Not even a pause. The moment I saw him in that gallery—Alistair Joseph Van Craven—I knew this would happen. I had tried to look away. I had tried to leave. But it was too late.

Curiosity is what people call it when they don't want to admit it's obsession.

I called it what it was.

His name filled the search bar with a kind of inevitability.

Alistair Craven.

Everything came up quickly: headlines, financial magazines, corporate profiles, photographs of him in tailored coats and expensive watches, flanked by people who smiled too wide.

He was always in the center. Always still. And somehow, always alone.

I combed through each article with surgical precision, taking in details most people wouldn't even notice: the way his mouth tightened when someone else spoke beside him, how he wore the same watch for seven years before switching to a vintage Omega,

the way his hands were always in motion unless he was being watched.

Everything about him was curated, composed. Perfect, but hollow. Like a museum display of a man who used to feel things.

And then I found his i********:.

@alistair.craven

Blue checkmark. Over three million followers. A public account with glossy photos of boardroom meetings, branded partnerships, charity galas, interviews with journalists who clearly didn't know what to do with him. The captions were clinical, almost impersonal.

I scrolled.

More polished photos. More distance.

It didn't feel right.

Not for him.

This—this account felt like it belonged to the idea of Alistair Craven, not the man who stood like a thunderstorm in the middle of a gallery and stared at my painting like he could feel it bleeding through the wall.

I closed the page.

Sat back.

Eyes narrowed.

There had to be something else.

Everyone leaves a shadow, eventually. Even the ones who try to stay invisible.

I searched deeper. I traced his digital presence the way I trace the curve of a brushstroke—slow, deliberate, exacting. Looked through tagged photos, secondary accounts, niche financial podcasts, ghost-linked Reddit posts from startup founders who owed him everything.

And then—

I saw it.

A profile buried under layers of nothing.

No name.

Just a symbol. A black-and-white crest. An unfamiliar emblem—ancient, almost. A falcon etched into a ring of thorns. No bio. No posts. Barely over a thousand followers. But something in me knew.

This wasn't for networking.

This was his.

I stared at the screen like it might blink first.

The kind of profile you don't stumble on. The kind you only find if you know what you're looking for. Hidden in plain sight. A private account with no public proof it belonged to him, and yet—every instinct in me screamed this is it.

I hovered for a moment.

And then I pressed Follow.

My heart slowed. Not sped up—slowed. Like my body was bracing for something it couldn't name.

That's when I felt it.

This strange sensation, like... something tightening behind my ribs. Like the pressure in the room had shifted. As if someone had just turned their eyes on me from across the ocean. Or across the street.

I looked up, half-expecting someone to be at the window.

Nothing.

The room was still. My laptop screen glowed against the dark.

And then the notification lit up.

@Aajcravon accepted your follow request.

I stared at it. The account hadn't posted anything. Nothing changed. But I could feel it.

He was there. On the other side of the screen.

And for the first time in years, I didn't feel alone in my obsession.

I felt... seen.