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Forty-One

LUNA

I wake to darkness,to silence, to the heavy weight of Beckett's arm draped possessively across my waist. The digital clock on the nightstand glows 3:17 AM. The familiar restlessness courses through me—that urgent, electric need that has always preceded my most honest work.

I need to paint.

Carefully, I slide out from beneath Beckett's arm, holding my breath as he shifts slightly but doesn't wake. I stand beside the bed for a moment, studying him in the dim moonlight filtering through the windows.

He looks different in sleep. Younger. The hard lines of his face softened, the perpetual vigilance relaxed into something approaching peace. Without the intensity of his gaze, without the careful control he maintains at all times, I can see the man beneath the power. The vulnerability he keeps hidden from everyone.

Everyone but me.

I slip on his discarded shirt, the fabric still carrying his scent, and pad barefoot through the silent house toward the studio. The moon is full tonight, casting long shadows across the stone floors, turning the brutalist architecture into something almost beautiful in its starkness.

The studio door opens silently, and I step into the space that has become my sanctuary in this strange prison. My fingers find the switch, flooding the room with soft light. The canvases I've completed during my time here are stacked against one wall—each one a marker of my emotional journey. Anger. Confusion. Desire. Fear.

But there's one canvas turned to face the wall. The first one I painted when I arrived. The one I've hidden from the security cameras. From Beckett.

I turn it around now, studying it with fresh eyes.

Beckett's face stares back at me from the canvas—not as he is, but as I first saw him. Cold. Cruel. Powerful. Dangerous. I painted him emerging from darkness, his features sharp enough to cut, his eyes holding nothing but ruthless calculation.

But looking at it now, after everything that's happened, after everything he's revealed to me... it doesn't feel right anymore. It doesn't feel complete.

I grab a fresh palette, squeezing out colors I rarely use—silver, gold, midnight blue, deep purple. Colors of night skies and distant stars. Without fully understanding what I'm doing, I begin to work, brush moving across the canvas with sure, steady strokes.

I don't change his face. I don't soften the intensity or erase the danger. Those are parts of him, true parts that I've seen and experienced. Instead, I work on the darkness surrounding him, transforming it from an empty void into a cosmic tapestry—stars scattered like diamonds across velvet, crescent moons hanging at different phases, constellations forming hidden patterns.

The work absorbs me completely, time dissolving as it always does when I'm creating something true. I step back finally, brush still in hand, to study what I've done.

The painting is still Beckett—still powerful, still dangerous—but now his darkness is illuminated. Now the void around him holds light. Now he exists in a universe that contains both shadow and brilliance.

Two sides of the same man.

I stare at the canvas, trying to understand what I've revealed about him. About myself. About us. Is the cosmic backdrop meant to be me? Luna—the moon, the night, the stars? Or is it simply the recognition that his darkness has always contained the potential for light?

"It's beautiful."

I startle, turning to find Beckett standing in the doorway, watching me with that intense gaze that seems to see straight through me. I hadn't heard him approach—hadn't sensed his presence until he spoke.

"How long have you been standing there?" I ask, suddenly self-conscious in just his shirt, bare legs exposed to his scrutiny.

"Long enough," he replies, eyes moving from me to the canvas and back again. He steps into the studio, approaching the painting with careful, measured steps. "Is that how you see me?"

The question hangs in the air between us, weighted with significance I'm not sure I'm ready to face. I look back at the canvas—at the man emerging from cosmic darkness, surrounded by light yet still unbowed by it.

"It's how I see you now," I admit softly.

He studies the painting in silence, his expression unreadable. "And before?"

I gesture to the parts of the canvas I haven't altered—the severe lines of his face, the coldness in his eyes, the predatory set of his mouth. "Just the darkness. Just the danger."

His gaze shifts to me, something unfathomable in its depths. "And now you see stars."

"Now I see everything," I correct him. "The darkness and the light. The danger and the..." I hesitate, not quite ready to say the word that hovers at the edge of my consciousness.

"The what?" he presses, stepping closer, his body radiating heat in the cool studio air.