Accidentally Claimed by the Billionaire Devil

Chapter 5

I snuck over to the door across the hall from the kitchen. It was ajar, and inside I had caught a glimpse of something.

But no, it couldn’t be.

One of my favorite graffiti artists in NYC had stopped putting anything up in the city two years ago. Nobody knew who he was apart from his tag. He signed all of his pieces with the name “Kage.” I’d tried to catch him in the act of tagging, lots of people had, but he was invisible.

His letters flowed like water, like sunlight through tree branches. When he painted a wall, nobody ever dared paint over it. That was how good he was. His pieces grew out of cracks in the brick, like his paint was a force of nature finding a way to flow out and into the world. Every painting he did was perfectly suited to the place he put it. It was as though the ugly bare walls had been waiting for him to come along and make them beautiful again.

I’d pored over his work, finding his stuff posted online and going to visit some of his pieces in person. He liked to throw his bigger pieces up in the alleyways downtown rather than in the subway. Much more dangerous. Much more risky. Maybe he had finally gotten caught, and that’s why he wasn’t painting anymore.

Now, though, staring me in the face was a painting by him that I had never seen before. I darted a glance back over at the kitchen door, swinging shut after another tuxedoed waiter passed through.

I had time, didn’t I?

I always had time for art. Just a peek, and I’d be back to deliver the cake. Then back to Harper’s to change, another ten minutes to get to my job… yeah, sure. I had plenty of time.

Pushing the door open, I stepped inside of the dimly lit room. There was nobody in the front of this room, although it looked like the room continued on through another doorway. The painting by Kage took up most of the wall, lit up by a single spotlight from below. I took a step closer and

“Ohh!”

My heel sunk into the carpet and caught there, sending me tumbling forward. I lunged forward and caught the cake before it fell, but I heard the contents shift inside the box.

“Stupid heels! Stupid, stupid,” I repeated. I kicked both of my heels off quickly and set the cake down on the carpet. I opened it up, praying it hadn’t gotten messed up.

“Oh no. Oh no.”

I bit my lip and looked closer. One of the orchid branches had bent, it looked like. The flower petals were digging into the gold icing on top. I reached in and pried back the fake flower, only to have the gold lift away on my fingertip. Frowning, I pushed the flower back. It didn’t look wrong like that. Maybe a little different from the one Harper had finished, but not bad.

I closed the lid, picked the cake back up, and was debating whether to enter the kitchen barefoot when I heard a noise.

“Hello?” I whispered. The rooms in here seemed so dim that I couldn’t imagine anyone from the party would be inside. But I had heard something.

I stepped inside, edging my way across the room. I still held the cake box in my hands, but it was easier to creep barefoot on the plush carpet. My toes sank down into the lush fibers.

“Hello?” I said, a bit louder. Then I poked my head around the doorway into the next room.

“Wow.”

This wasn’t a bedroom or a kitchen. This wasn’t just another ordinary part of the house.

It was an art gallery.

I gaped at the paintings that filled the walls of the room. There were a dozen or so large canvases hanging from steel wires in the middle of the room. The canvases were big, and hung a couple of feet above the floor, creating a sort of viewing maze. And there, in the middle

Another painting… by him.

I walked forward, holding the cake still, but my attention was entirely on the canvas in front of me.

KAGE. This was all lettering, none of the decoration that marked his other pieces. But there was no need for decoration, no need for any ornaments or frills. The lettering was art already. The broad swoop of the first letter carried over through the name, and each letter seemed to flow through to the next with a hundred small tendrils, all green and gold and vibrant. It felt natural. It felt real.

This was what I was shooting for every time I put up a flower. I wanted this to be able to make the art seem as though it was growing out of the canvas on its own. The art was composed of the letters of the artist’s name, but the artist was invisible in the art itself.

When my mom scolded me for painting graffiti on our fences, I couldn’t explain why I was doing what I was doing. But this painting, this piece of art, made sense to me in a way that nothing else could. I couldn’t do watercolor postcard-sized paintings and hope to have this effect.

Kage’s art was big; it loomed. It was meant to fill this space.

Looking up at the painting, I was too distracted to notice anything until I saw his shoes.

It was a man, standing on the other side of the painting. If the canvas hadn’t been there, he could have reached out and touched me. I didn’t know where he had come from.

In my shock, I gasped… and my hands slipped. The cake box that I had carried for blocks and blocks in high heels, the cake box I’d clenched all the way up the insanely scary elevator it slid out of my grasp.

I could only watch in horror as the cake box opened and Harper’s two-thousand dollar masterpiece split in half, the top layer of cake falling upside down onto the plush carpet.

Oh dear Lord. Oh my sweet jelly bean Jesus.

What had I done? I stood stock still, my fingers splayed outward as though I might be able to reverse time and put the cake back together. I didn’t want to be here. This wasn’t happening. Two thousand dollars. This was a nightmare.

Then I heard his voice come from behind the canvas. It was a voice so booming and low that it made goosebumps run along my arms.

“Who are you?”

I couldn’t see any of him but his shoes and an ankle’s worth of pant legs. His shoes were black, polished. Shiny. A fleck of gold icing had flown off of the cake I’d just dropped and landed on his left shoe. I swallowed.