Chapter Twenty: The Frame Is Mine Now
Lena didn’t sleep the night the headline dropped.
She didn’t rage.
She didn’t cry.
She sat in the library, barefoot in one of Nikolai’s old sweaters, legs curled under her, reading the same paragraph of a novel ten times and absorbing none of it.
The words blurred behind the weight of a single phrase:
“Lena Marceau: The Stolen Muse.”
She wasn’t surprised.
The world didn’t know how to let a woman exist outside two categories: victim or villain.
She closed the book and stared into the fire.
She had been both before.
She would not be either now.
**
Nikolai found her there at dawn.
He moved quietly, barefoot, as if afraid to wake something sacred—or maybe afraid she was already too awake to soothe.
She didn’t look up.
“I read it,” he said.
