Chapter 2 "Canvas of Desperation,”

࿐ྂ༻꒦꒷𓇊꒷꒦༺࿐ྂ

“Chapter 1: Canvas of Desperation,”

────── ꕥ ⋅ IVORY ⋅ ꕥ ──────

The rejection letter shook in my hands.

Third one this month. Twelfth one this year.

They all said the same thing, just in different fonts:

Dear Ms. Marwood. While your work shows promise, it doesn't quite fit our gallery's current vision…

I let it fall. It drifted down to the floor and landed on top of the eleven others, and I just stood there and stared at the pile like it had personally wronged me.

Which, fair. It kind of had.

The apartment around me was its usual disaster. Paint-stained drop cloths everywhere. Half-eaten ramen cups on the counter. Canvases stacked three-deep against every wall - each one a piece of my soul that the world had collectively decided it didn't want.

The evening light came through the dirty windows and made it all look golden anyway.

Rude of it.

"Twenty-seven years old," I said out loud, to nobody. "And this is what I have to show for it."

The apartment didn't respond. It never did.

I looked at my latest painting on the easel - all dark reds and swirling black, loud and alive and angry in a way I couldn't quite explain. I'd been working on it for two weeks.

The last gallery owner had taken one look at it and frowned.

Collectors want something they can live with, darling.

I had smiled and nodded and thought: what a miserable thing to say about art.

I didn't get the sale.

The knock hit the door like it was trying to break through it.

I jumped. Paint flew off my brush and streaked across my jeans in a line of cadmium red.

Of course.

"Marwood! Open up!"

Mr. Greeley. My landlord. Right on time, as always, to remind me that my life was falling apart.

I wiped my hands on a rag and opened the door just to the chain. Two inches of gap. Barely enough to see his face going red already.

"Mr. Greeley!" Fake smile. Fake laugh. The whole show. "I was just about to call you-"

"Save it." He shoved a folded paper through the gap before I could finish the sentence. "Three months, Ms. Marwood. Three months of it's coming, I promise, just one more week. I run a business. Not a charity."

"I understand, but-"

"Friday. Three thousand dollars. Every single penny. Or you're out."

I took the paper. Eviction notice. Heavy cardstock, official font, absolutely zero sympathy.

"Sure," I said. "I'll have it."

"You'd better." His eyes moved past me into the apartment - the canvases, the drop cloths, the cold coffee - and the look on his face said everything he didn't need to say out loud. "Maybe if you painted things people actually wanted-"

The door closed before I could answer.

Which was probably good. Because what I wanted to say would not have helped my situation.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the door.

Crumpled the eviction notice. Uncrumpled it. Stared at it.

Then I opened my banking app, because I'm apparently the kind of person who enjoys making herself feel worse.

$43.27.

Forty-three dollars. Twenty-seven cents.

Three thousand dollars by Friday.

I put the phone face-down on the floor.

Outside my sixth-floor window, the city glittered like it had no idea I existed. All those towers were full of people who could buy my paintings with their lunch money and never think twice about it.

How did it come to this, Ivory? Seriously. How?

Four years ago, I was someone. Or at least I thought I was. Top of my graduating class, professors raving about my work, gallery owners looking at me like I was the next big thing.

I believed them. I packed everything up and moved to the city with my art and my ambition and the absolute certainty that the world was waiting.

The world was not waiting.

My classmates pivoted. Made their work softer, safer - pretty things in pretty colors that matched people's furniture. They got shows. They got sales.

I kept painting the dark stuff. The honest stuff. The kind of work that made people uncomfortable in ways they couldn't name.

Honesty, it turned out, could not pay a single bill.

I got up eventually and went to make coffee because I needed to do something.

I flipped the kitchen light switch on autopilot.

Nothing happened.

I flipped it again. And again. And one more time, even though I already knew.

Still nothing.

"No." I said it quietly. "No, no, no-"

I found the notice in the kitchen drawer. The one I'd been deliberately not opening for two weeks.

FINAL WARNING: Electricity will be disconnected if payment is not received by-

Today's date. Right there in red bold letters.

Something broke open in my chest.

A laugh came out - this horrible, hollow sound that echoed off the walls and honestly scared me a little. I slid back down to the floor, in the dark now, surrounded by my paintings and my failures and two weeks' worth of avoided mail.

"Can't even afford to see my own failures," I said. "Great. Fantastic. Really nailing this whole artist thing."

The paintings watched me from the walls like silent witnesses.

The city kept sparkling outside like I wasn't even happening.

Hours passed.

I know because the light changed - gray to blue to the deep orange-black of a city night - and at some point my tears dried and I stopped feeling the cold from the floor. I just sat there. Not thinking. Not not-thinking. Just existing in the specific way you do when things are so bad your brain gives up on processing and just goes quiet.

And then -

Shhhk.

Something slid under the door.

Small sound. Almost nothing. But in the total silence of my apartment it was as loud as a gunshot.

I uncurled myself from the floor and crossed to it.

An envelope. Heavy cream paper. My name was written on the front in handwriting so precise it looked like it had been engraved, not written.

Ivory Marwood.

No return address. No stamp.

I picked it up.

And then - just for a second, gone almost before I caught it - I smelled something strange.

Not perfume. Not ink. Something underneath all of that.

Wild. Deep. Like pine and rain and dark earth. Like a forest at night - the real kind, the kind with things living in it.

I frowned. Brought the envelope closer. Sniffed it again.

Nothing. Just paper.

You need sleep, I told myself. You're officially hallucinating smells.

I shook it off and tore it open.

Inside was a card made of the same heavy paper, embossed with a symbol I didn't recognize - a crescent moon wrapped around a droplet that could have been water. Or, in this light, something else.

Ms. Ivory Marwood,

Your presence is requested at Luné Devain. Tomorrow evening. Nine o'clock. Opportunity awaits those brave enough to seize it. 28 Blackwood Lane, Basement Level. This invitation admits one.

I flipped the card. Nothing on the back.

Luné Devain. Never heard of it. And Blackwood Lane was in the old warehouse district - not exactly a hotspot for gallery events. No legitimate art show sent hand-delivered mystery invitations with no return address.

My first thought: this is a prank. Some former classmate who'd seen me buying the cheapest brushes in the store last week while they debated imported Italian oils. Ha. Very funny.

I was already about to crumple it when I caught the postscript.

Tiny. Almost invisible. Tucked right along the bottom edge.

P.S. We are prepared to offer significant compensation for the right artistic companion.

Compensation.

The word stopped me cold.

I read it again. Then again.

"Artistic companion," I said out loud. "What does that even mean?"

Here's the thing though - when you have forty-three dollars and three days until eviction, you ask fewer questions. The meaning of artistic companion suddenly mattered a lot less than the meaning of significant compensation.

I set the card on my table and looked at it.

The crescent moon symbol caught the streetlight coming through the window. Glowed faintly, warm and strange. The droplet at its center looked - really, unmistakably - like blood.

Don't be dramatic, I told myself. It's just an invitation.

My spine disagreed. This slow shiver moved through me that wasn't fear exactly and wasn't excitement exactly but was somewhere right in between, leaning toward the edge.

I grabbed my phone - twelve percent battery - and searched Luné Devain.

Nothing. No website. No listing. No reviews. No digital footprint at all, like someone had worked very hard to make sure it didn't exist on paper.

I was about to put the phone down when it buzzed. Unknown number.

We've been watching your career with great interest, Ms. Marwood. Your darkness speaks to us. Tomorrow night could change everything. Come alone.

The phone nearly slipped out of my hand. Before I could even breathe, a second message came through.

The wealthy have always fed on artists. The question is - what are you willing to feed them in return?

I set the phone down on the floor. Very carefully. Like it might bite me.

My brain was doing the thing where it runs through every logical explanation fast, looking for the one that makes sense. Weird promotion. Eccentric collector. Performance art.

Sure. Maybe. Probably.

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay on my mattress and stared at the ceiling and thought about the texts and the invitation and the wolf-forest smell that hadn't been there. I thought about what an artistic companion could mean. I thought about forty-three dollars and what three thousand looked like from this far away.

Near dawn, I gave up and picked up a brush.

If tomorrow night was going to ruin me, I was going to meet it like myself. I pulled a fresh canvas onto the easel and painted - a self-portrait in red and black, my own face half-lit, half-dark, wearing an expression I had never actually seen in a mirror.

Not quite afraid. Not quite brave. Something in between. Leaning forward.

When the first pale morning light came through the window, I stepped back and looked at it.

The woman in the painting stared back at me. And in her eyes was something I didn't have yet - the look of someone who already knew what was waiting at the end of tomorrow night.

And went anyway. I touched the embossed symbol on the invitation with one paint-stained finger. It was warm. Warmer than paper had any right to be.

"Okay," I said quietly. "Let's see what you've got."

────── ꕥ ⋅ ꕥ ──────