Page 6 of A Virgo's Muse
I pushed away from the counter and walked toward the door. My hand lingered on the handle. I turned my head, looking back at her over my shoulder, catching the way the light played against her cheekbone, that stubborn look still carved into her face.
“I’ll see you again, Desire.”
She didn’t say goodbye, but she didn’t tell me not to come back either. That was all I needed.
Hours Later
It was close to 2:00 a.m. when I finally slid into the black SUV I stashed near Walnut and Fifth. No keys, push to start, no ID—just muscle memory and a clean print on the ignition button.
Desire’s scent still lingered on my hoodie. I shouldn’t have noticed, but I did. I drove with the windows down, letting the night air erase the feel of her hands on mine. It didn’t work. It never did.
The world I returned to after her wasn’t anything like the one she lived in. Her world had color, chaos, and creativity. Mine?Mine had grayscale, precision, silence, and scars. I didn’t get to paint feelings. I cleaned up the aftermath of them.
The Heights—2:23 a.m.
I parked a block away from the estate.
Rich man, clean shoes, dirty hands—the kind of client who never called twice. He knew better. My work didn’t come with invoices or receipts. You get one fix, one night, one ghost to handle your business.
The guard dogs were gone. Cameras looped. Entry granted. I entered through the east corridor, the one that led past the wine cellar and up into the study. The house was dark except for a desk lamp in the far corner of the room where he was waiting. Mr. Whitmore, hair combed, robe pressed, but his fingers trembled around the rim of a whiskey glass.
“He’s in the panic room,” Whitmore said without looking at me. “The broker.”
“What’s the issue?”
“He downloaded the offshore account files. Threatened to leak them if I didn’t triple his fee.”
My jaw tightened.
“You want him gone?”
“I want the files back. And I want him reminded that blackmail only works if you make it out alive.”
I nodded once. I knew that was the only signal he needed.
I moved through the house like I lived here. I didn’t speak, didn’t rush. I opened the back hall panel, keyed in the code I was given, and unlocked the panic room. The broker inside didn’t even have time to scream.
He was on the floor five minutes later, alive but out cold. The thumb drive was snug in my pocket, his phone destroyed, and laptop scrubbed.
By the time I left, I’d erased the breach, the threat, and every trace of his betrayal. The only thing I left behind was fear.
The Safe House—3:11 a.m.
Back at the warehouse loft, I peeled off my gloves and tossed them into the burn bin. No trophies. No evidence. Just quiet.
I sat down at the table with the broker’s flash drive and began spinning it between my fingers. I wasn’t even going to open it. My job was retrieval, not curiosity. Curiosity got you killed in my line of work.
But somewhere between the rhythm of the spinning drive and the silence in this loft, my mind drifted again to her. To that damn wheel, to her hands shaking beneath mine but never pulling away, and to the way her paintings looked like they’d been argued with, cursed at, and cried over.
Rough brush strokes that end mid-thought, colors that shouldn’t go together but did, beauty that didn’t beg for your approval, it dares you to understand it—that’s what I saw in her. I also saw fire and fight, softness buried under barbed wire.
She didn’t know what I really did. She didn’t know what I’d done to survive. But she made me feel human again, and for a second, I could be free. And that? That was dangerous. Because I’d burned cities for less than that feeling.
And if I went back to her…
I didn’t know if I’d ever leave again.
It’d beenweeks since I last saw him. Since his hands guided mine across the clay like they had all the time in the world.
