Page 37 of Kept

Nobody was there.

I rounded on Spears, my heart drumming again. “You let me think I was naked in front of your students. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life!”

The sharp edges of my nails dug into my palms when I clenched my fists. No matter how beautiful Spears was, he might have been the most twisted of them all.

He picked up his sketchbook and pencil and laid them on the table, taking me in with hooded eyes. “What do you have to be embarrassed about?”

I opened my mouth as the list of a million flaws flashed through my mind, but then I closed it. He didn’t want to hear my flaws because he apparently didn’t see them. I could’ve told him it was the vulnerability alone that had been horrifying, but… hadn’t it also been a littlethrilling?

Their mind games and power plays were making me as crazy and sick as they were.

“Nothing.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Not now that I knew he was the only one who’d been in here, anyway.

Spears crossed the short distance between us, his hand hovering over the curve of my cheek. He brushed a stray curl behind my ear. “Now you understand.”

I gazed up at him, not understanding at all. I had plenty to be embarrassed about, even if he didn’t give a damn about it.

His gaze dropped to my lips, but before I could imagine what it would be like to kiss someone with such an icy exterior, he’d turned away to gather my clothes. “Come with me, Jane.”

I followed him to his office, and he closed the door behind me and allowed me to dress in peaceful silence. It never failed to strike me how the silences I shared with the three of them were never uncomfortable, but comforting.

They peeled me away layer by layer every time they exercised their power over me, but instead of being whittled away into nothing, I was taking a new form, even if I couldn’t see what it might be yet. They were marble sculptors chipping away piece by piece, revealing the shape beneath the formless mass they’d started with.

As I dressed, I had more time to examine the slew of paintings and sketches on his office walls. Several sketches that were so photorealistic I wondered if they weren’t sepia photographs hung over the actual desk, but there was a smaller set of sketches below them on the bookshelf.

I wandered a little closer as I buttoned my shirt. The edges of the paper were worn and shredded on these ones, and the pencil strokes were harsh and rough. From the shaky lines and imprecise, exaggerated forms, they looked like a child’s sketches. I wanted to pick them up, but the propriety of a gesture like that was too much for me to risk it.

The thought of that made my throat tighten. There was a portrait of a woman with cruel eyes and a hard face, and the next was that same woman in a nun’s habit. A sketch of a window set in a cracked wall rested beside her. “What are these?”

Gabriel looked up from studying the sketchbook on his desk and followed my gaze. His brilliant eyes darkened when he looked them over, and I suppressed a shiver when he came to stand at my shoulder and picked up the sketch of the nun.

He handed it to me. The paper was even thinner than it looked, barely thicker than tissue. I handled it like it would disintegrate in my hands if I touched it too roughly, peering at the fainter lines under the rough sketch. Someone had drawn and erased, drawn and erased until the background was gray with old marks, the ghosts of sketches past.

“They’re a reminder of where I came from, that everything can be taken away except art. Art will always survive. It lives up here.”

He touched his temple with a faint smile, and I looked back down at the nun. “You drew these.”

“I did.”

“Who is she?” Where had he been that he’d drawn such bleak, desperate things?

Gabriel examined the nun’s hard face with a hard, cold hate. “She was my first muse.”

I carefully replaced the sketch on the shelf. Whoever she was, she was the subject of almost all the worn sketches here. Once I looked harder, there was even a faint shadow in the drawing of the window that could’ve been the nun sitting off to the side, watching from the shadows.

“You don’t seem to have liked her very much.” I regretted the inane comment as soon as it left my mouth. Of course he didn’t like her; there was contempt and hatred in every line of these drawings, even if I hadn’t seen the emotion itself in Gabriel’s eyes.

The corners of his mouth tightened. “A muse isn’t always necessarily beautiful. Sometimes, the hatred itself is the inspiration.”

He turned away from the sketches, effectively shutting down any more questions, but that tiny peek into Gabriel Spears’ past was maddening.

“What sort of muse am I, then?”

I was almost afraid to hear the answer. He must’ve been in a depressing slump if someone like a Plain Jane could inspire anything in him. It was a good thing he couldn’t hear my thoughts either, because he seemed to think there was something I should understand about myself, even if I couldn’t see what it was.

My breath caught when he approached, slowly backing me up against the wall. Gabriel planted a hand on either side of my head, searching my eyes like he was looking for something.

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