Page 39 of The Beast

Chapter Thirteen

Gabriel stood in the dark, staring at the empty wall where Caged used to hang as the focal point of this room in their gallery. The painting was in his apartment now, locked with him beneath the ground where he could look at it whenever he wanted, torturing himself in private as he longed for a past he could never reclaim.

That’s where he should be now, too. In that utilitarian room, his laptop open as he planned and strategized, and waged his private war. After all, he had an empire to dismantle. A woman to destroy. He should be sharpening the knife he’d spent five years forging.

Instead, he was standing in the dark, trying to call up the scent of her perfume, and losing his goddamn mind.

She’d touched his face.

Soft and gentle, her eyes both sad and hopeful.

He’d meant to punish her with that kiss. Meant to prove she was weak, that her body would always betray her. But then her fingers had brushed his jaw, and something in her expression had flickered. Grief, maybe. Or loss.

Like she was looking for someone who wasn’t there anymore.

With a sigh, he crossed the gallery space and pressed his palm against the empty wall. The plaster was cold. Caged.

He’d painted it in three days, almost seven years ago, barely sleeping, barely eating. Just him and the canvas and the desperate need to get her out of his head and on to something he could touch.

That was what painting had always been for him—an outlet. A way to bleed without making anyone else bleed.

His father had seen the darkness in him early. Had cultivated it, even. Gabe was the oldest son, the heir, the one who would carry the Grimm name into the next generation. Elias had taught him to be hard. To be feared. To walk into a room and know that every person in it would bend to his will or break against it.

And Gabriel had liked it. God help him, he’d actually liked it. The power. The control. The knowledge that he would always come out on top.

But the darkness had a cost. It built up inside him, and if he didn’t find a way to release it carefully, it found its own release. He’d learned that lesson early on—learned it in bloody knuckles and broken furniture and the fear of everyone around him.

Then he’d found art, and it was an epiphany. A way to pour all that rage and hunger and desperate wanting into something that couldn’t bleed back.

He’d never told his family, but Izzy had understood. How could she not, when it was only Izzy and his art that kept the beast at bay?

Now, though, she was gone, and art was his only way of caging the beast.

He drew in a breath, shoving the thoughts aside as he recalled the hours spent painting Caged. The way he’d rendered the woman he loved in pigment and longing.

In the painting, she was reaching. Always reaching. Fingers stretched toward light that was just out of grasp, her face caught between hope and despair.

He’d painted her eyes last. Had spent six hours on them alone, mixing colors until he got the exact shade of her mismatched irises. That celestial blue. That verdant green. The colors that still haunted his dreams.

The eyes he’d seen behind the muzzle of a gun.

With a shudder, he forced the vile memory away. This was about the magic times. The fake times.

The times when she had fooled him. Like the way she’d cried when she first saw the painting.

“Is that how you see me?” she’d whispered. “Trapped?”

“Reaching,” he’d said. “I see you reaching.”

She’d kissed him then. Soft and slow and full of something that felt like promise. That was it, he’d thought. That was the life I was supposed to have.

He’d taken it from her, and now he didn’t know why he’d come here except that he’d lost the battle to stay away. Now the wall was empty, and his heart was emptier.

He walked through the rest of the gallery slowly. The lighting was dim, but he didn’t need light. He knew every piece by heart. Knew the nights he’d painted them, the music he’d been listening to as he focused only on canvas and color, the coffee growing cold on his worktable.

He knew the story behind each canvas. Which came from joy, which from pain, which from fury.

Most of all, he knew which came from the desperate, aching need to be seen by someone who understood.