Page 30 of The Forgery Mate (Taken by His Alpha #6)

I come back to myself hours later, the sting of dried blood pulling at my skin, my knuckles crusted and flaking when I flex my fingers.

Evening light filters in through my bathroom window, illuminating the aftermath of this morning’s rage. Glass shards wink in the sink, and my damaged cell blinks weakly amid more glass shards on the floor.

I stumble to my feet, and water sputters from the faucet when I turn it on, spattering on the broken pieces of the mirror in the basin. Careful of all the mess, I clean my wounds, kicking myself for injuring myself in the first place.

My hands are my career. What if I had cut through muscle or tendon? Then what would I have left?

Once I’m sure I’ve cleaned the glass from the wounds, I bandage them. The cut on my neck has stopped bleeding, leaving a thin scab where the razor slipped. Not deep enough to scar, but I clean that, too, and apply a bandage.

My fragmented reflection in the mirror stares at me, an eye here, the curve of a jaw there, split across dozens of broken pieces. I lean closer to the largest shard still intact, studying the stranger reflected in it.

“Ren Mercier,” I whisper, testing the syllables.

It’s a name I haven’t worn comfortably since my grandfather went to prison. It tastes of dust and disuse, an antique pulled from storage. It sits exposed in my mouth, stripped of protective layers, skin torn raw after ripping away a bandage.

I say it again, louder. “Ren Mercier.”

The name echoes back to me, bouncing off broken glass and hard tile, but offers no revelation, no sudden clarity about who I am beneath all the facades I’ve constructed.

I turn away from the destruction, feet padding across the wooden floor of my loft toward the studio area. Light filters through the tall windows, casting long rectangles across canvases both blank and half-finished. My fingers twitch with purpose, a familiar itch that demands satisfaction.

If I can’t speak my truth, perhaps I can paint it.

An empty canvas sits on my main easel, pristine and waiting.

I gather my supplies with the efficiency of decades of practice, squeezing paints onto my palette, arranging brushes by size, uncapping turpentine, its sharp scent clearing my head.

The smell reminds me of my grandfather, of his patient hands guiding mine across canvas after canvas, teaching me to become someone else through art.

But today, I don’t want to become someone new. I want to remember where I came from.

Eyes closed, I summon the image of Anatomy of a Ghost from memory.

My grandfather’s masterpiece. The ghost that haunted us both.

The painting that first connected me to Ezra, that began this strange, twisted dance between us.

I’ve studied every brushstroke, every subtle blend of color and shadow.

I could reproduce it perfectly. Have reproduced dozens of paintings just like it over the years.

Instead, my hands mix colors with violent intent, creating hues that bleed into each other, crimson pulsing like an open wound, blacks deep enough to swallow light, blues that scream rather than whisper.

My brush attacks the canvas, movements sharp and decisive where my grandfather’s were controlled and precise. Paint splatters across my bare chest, speckling the love bites Ezra left, merging with spots of dried blood. I don’t bother wiping it away.

The ghost at the center of the painting emerges not through careful rendering but through absence, negative space where the brush skips, where white canvas shows through like bone. Its edges blur into the surrounding violence of color, a figure trying to manifest and disappear at the same time.

I step back, chest heaving from exertion. This isn’t my grandfather’s forgery, perfect in its emulation. This isn’t Knox’s studied recreation or Lorenzo’s flashy interpretation. This is raw, unfiltered Ren, spilled across canvas in a language I didn’t know I spoke.

The ghost in the original painting was ethereal, elegant in its haunting. The specter on my canvas screams with a nonexistent mouth, its form both dissolving and solidifying. It’s more real than the man who created it, more honest than any alias I’ve ever worn.

Sweat trickles down my spine as I make final, aggressive strokes, my signature nowhere to be found. Let Ezra wonder if this is my work. Let him question what part of me created this chaos.

I reach for my phone, the web of cracks distorting the camera’s view.

Perfect.

I photograph the canvas, the fractured screen adding another layer of brokenness to the image. Without thinking, I send it to Ezra. No text. No explanation. Just raw, violent truth splashed across a canvas meant to capture ghosts.

Only after it reads Delivered do I notice the darkness outside, the city quiet. It’s deep into the middle of the night, long past when sane people sleep.

But the message switches to Read immediately.

My thumb hovers over the screen, waiting for the three dots that indicate he’s typing a response.

They never appear.

Minutes stretch into an hour. I sit on my paint-splattered floor, phone clutched in my hand, dried paint cracking on my skin like fresh wounds. The ghost on my canvas stares back, incomplete yet more honest than anything I’ve created in years.

Two hours pass.

The phone remains silent. I pace my loft, returning to check the screen every few minutes like an addict seeking a fix.

Nothing comes.

By the third hour, understanding settles into my bones. This isn’t punishment. It’s patience. Ezra has always been steps ahead of me, calculating moves I didn’t know were being made. He’s waiting. For what, I’m not sure.

For me to crack further? For me to come to him? For me to stop fighting what we both know is inevitable?

Dawn lightens the sky outside the window, casting new light across my violent canvas. The ghost shifts with it, changing perspective with each passing hour. Like me, it refuses to be pinned down to a single truth.

I set the phone screen-down on my workbench, forcing myself to stop checking for a response that isn’t coming. Ezra is waiting for me to stop looking backward at my grandfather’s legacy, at the forgeries that built my reputation, at the ghosts that haunt both canvas and conscience.

He’s waiting for me to see what lies ahead.

The antique pocket watch feels heavy in my palm, its gold case worn from being tucked against Tobias Crane’s chest for years.

I run my thumb across the engraved initials, not mine or even Tobias’s. It belonged to someone who sold it at an estate sale without knowing its value. The timepiece ticks, marking seconds in a life I’ve borrowed rather than lived.

I drop it into the trash bin, the metallic clunk satisfying in its finality.

Next, I pull Lorenzo’s Italian silk scarf from the drawer.

The fabric slithers between my fingers, cool and slick as water.

I drape it around my neck above Ezra’s collar, the way Lorenzo wore it at gallery openings across Europe.

But it sits wrong, the silk catching on my stubble.

I’ve always hated the way scarves constrict, the constant adjusting, the performance of it.

With a decisive yank, I pull it off and toss it onto the growing pile of discarded lies.

“Who wears scarves indoors, anyway?” I mutter to the empty loft, my voice rough from disuse.

My fingers find Elias Knox’s tortoiseshell glasses, the lenses clear glass rather than prescription.

I slip them on, watching the world sharpen into the crisp lines Knox preferred, everything categorized, analyzed, and distanced by academia.

The weight on my nose annoys me now, the frames pinching my temples.

These, too, join the discard pile.

Item by item, I dissect the men I’ve pretended to be.

Knox’s leather-bound journals filled with observations on art forgery techniques I’ve known since childhood.

Lorenzo’s gaudy rings that draw attention to hands I prefer to keep anonymous.

Nico Duran’s unassuming black server uniform, perfect for fading into backgrounds while scouting security systems.

With each discarded piece, I search for what remains, for what belongs to Ren rather than his creations. The answers emerge slowly, like photographs developing in chemical solutions.

Small truths, scattered pieces of a man I barely recognize.

The pile grows, taking up too much space in my workspace. My focus drifts to the violent canvas from earlier, the ghost trapped in its center, a blur of negative space and color, and frustration builds in my chest.

This painting isn’t me, either. It’s rage splashed across canvas, reaction rather than creation.

I push it off the easel, then step on it, the thick paint still wet in places beneath my heels and leaving colorful footprints on the floorboards.

I cross to my bed, dropping to my knees to reach beneath the frame.

There, wrapped in acid-free paper and tucked away where I wouldn’t have to see it, lies a drawing I never finished.

The charcoal feels right in my hands as I unwrap it, the paper soft and familiar beneath my fingertips. Ezra’s face emerges from careful strokes, younger, softer than he is now, caught in sleep, in dreaming.

I thought I was capturing the real Ezra then, the boy beneath the collector’s confidence. But I was wrong. His softness was the mask he wore to make me believe I held some power in our dance.

The fresh sheet of paper crackles as I unfold it on my drawing board, and my fingers itch with purpose.

I open my charcoal set, selecting pieces with care. The soft vine charcoal for broad strokes. The harder compressed charcoal for definition. Blending stumps for the shadows that live beneath his cheekbones.

The first strokes are confident, mapping the architecture of a face I know better than my own. I’ve drawn him hundreds of times, as Knox studying a subject, as Ren memorizing a lover. But this time, I draw him as he is, the hunter I didn’t recognize until it was too late.