by Lila Dubois
Caden stopped speaking, and in a complete reversal of what had happened moments ago, he slid to his knees before Darling, dropping his head into her lap.
She stroked her fingers through his hair. “It’s okay, love, it’s okay.”
The silence was so thick it was like a sucking, sticky fog seeping into everyone’s skin.
“Why didn’t you go to someone?” Jasper asked. “You were children.”
“There were…extenuating circumstances. Reasons we didn’t, and don’t, say anything.”
A moment passed before Irina, who looked as if she were about to burst from the effort of holding back her comment, said, “Why do you still let him do that to you?”
The question was made absurd by the fact that Caden was kneeling at Darling’s feet, his head on her lap. It reminded Eli of a tableau from one of the Romantics’ paintings—perhaps a Waterhouse.
Darling raised a brow. “Let him what? Be my master? Because I like it. Because it’s what I am. It’s who I am. Submitting—submitting to him—is where I feel safe.”
Irina looked like she wanted to argue the point. Caden rose to his feet and held up his hand. It was easy to see why Darling felt safe with him. He gave off an air of quiet, grim authority.
“Maybe the Grand Master will put us together in a trinity with someone lovely and normal and we’ll change. But for now, this is what we have. This is the best way I have to show her that I love her.” Caden looked at Darling. “Show her that I’ll always keep her safe.”
His face hardened, and once again Eli tensed. The way Caden was looking at Darling, as if she were a bunny and Caden a hungry wolf, made Eli very, very worried for her. Yet Darling looked unconcerned—she smiled at Caden, reaching her hand up to him.
Instead of lacing his fingers with hers, Caden grabbed her wrist, jerking her forward a few inches.
“She’s mine. And will always be mine.”
Chapter Thirteen
Irina opened one eye, peering around the room. There were no clocks, and she wasn’t wearing a watch. Their phones were powered off, so she had nothing on which to guess the time but a narrow band of light that pierced the murky darkness via a small opening in the heavy blackout curtains. The light was gold more than silver, which meant it was after dawn, but she had no idea if it was eight in morning or one in the afternoon.
Irina sat up, shoving aside masses of puffy gold duvet.
“Good morning.”
Irina yelped, whipping to her right. The mounds of pillows and covers had camouflaged Jasper, who tossed a few pillows to the floor as he too sat up. Irina had slept in the middle of the ridiculous bed, Jasper on her right, Eli on her left.
She looked to the other side. Eli was already up and gone.
“How did you sleep?” Jasper asked.
“Not great. It took me a long time to fall asleep.”
“I think that happened to all of us.”
After the conversation with their fellow Trinity Masters, Irina, Jasper, and Eli had trudged back to their room. They’d gotten ready for bed—changing into PJs, brushing their teeth. It had been strangely domestic, all of them piled into the bathroom, taking turns using the sink.
Then they’d climbed into bed, close enough to touch, but not cuddling. Irina had lain awake, arms stretched out so she held Eli’s hand and rested her fingers on Jasper’s shoulder.
“If you’ll excuse me.” Jasper slid out of bed and padded to the bathroom.
Irina threw open the curtains, blinking at the light. It was mid-morning by her guess. She stretched a few times—her hip no longer ached, but the bruise was still there. She found her suitcase, flipped it open, and pulled on clean clothes—jeans and a black sweater with a deep V. She usually wore the sweater to work, over the top of a button-up shirt. Without the shirt, the V cut deep enough to almost reveal the edge of her bra, and showed off plenty of cleavage.
Jasper, wearing only sweatpants, exited the bathroom. They stopped for a moment, admiring each other. A little shiver of arousal shook Irina. That feeling was followed immediately by relief. After Darling and Caden’s stories last night, she worried she’d never find anything arousing again.
Then her bladder protested, so she walked past Jasper, trailing her fingers along the bare skin above his waistband. He hummed in approval and stretched to give her ass a quick squeeze.
Laughing, Irina slid into the bathroom. She used the toilet, brushed her teeth, and pulled her hair up into a ponytail, then scrubbed her face before applying the same “look, I’m not wearing makeup” makeup she’d used the day before.
Finally ready to face the day, she left the bathroom. The bedroom was empty, so she headed down the stairs to the lower level. Her libido perked up, wondering if they were going to take advantage of the room’s amenities, even while the rest of her was having a violently negative reaction to the idea of any sort of power exchange play, because of Darling’s story.
She was rehearsing what she wanted to say on the topic of sex and kink when she rounded the last curve in the stairs, leaning to the side to see her men.
My men. I like that.
Turned out she didn’t need to worry about discussing sex, because Eli and Jasper’s attention was focused on the one thing they found more interesting than sex.
Art.
Eli, who unlike Jasper and Irina, still wore PJs, was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. He was wearing latex gloves and using the corner of a brilliant ruby scarf to hold the edges of a thin gold frame. The canvas within that frame was an explosion of colors—deepest violet, blood and ruby reds, and golden yellows. If she’d been standing closer, Irina might not have realized what it was, but from a distance it was clear that the painting was of flowers, rendered in oil and the expressionist style.
They’d opened the other crates. She sucked in a breath and hurried over.
Jasper was sitting beside Eli, hands over his mouth as he gazed at the painting.
Irina circled around until she could see both of their faces. Eli’s eyes were damp with tears, and Jasper looked like he was in shock.
“Eli? Jasper?”
Eli carefully passed the painting to Jasper, who also wore gloves and used a scarf to hold the frame. Jasper propped the painting against its crate, leaning it there so they could look at it.
Eli shook his head. “There’s no way they didn’t know.”
“Not after what happened in Sweden,” Jasper replied.
Irina looked at the painting. She was fighting outside of her weight class when it came to art, but she took a stab in the dark. “Is it…a Van Gogh?”
The bright colors seemed Van Gogh-like, but the flowers didn’t look like the paintings of irises or sunflowers, the only two Van Gogh flower paintings she could think of.
Eli snorted and Jasper shook his head. Irina fought the urge to curl into a ball of embarrassment for having said something that was clearly dumb.
“Emil Nolde. This is an Emil Nolde oil painting.” Jasper shook his head again. “This is unbelievable.”
“Eli,” Irina said piteously.
He cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses. “The expressionists aren’t my area of specialty, but you can’t study the effect of Nazi Germany on art without talking about Emil Nolde.”
“The irony.” Jasper shook his head. “Nolde was a member of the Nazi party, but Hitler condemned what was at the time modern art. He called it ‘degenerate art.’”
Eli picked up where Jasper left off. “More of Nolde’s art was removed from museums than that of any other artist. He appealed to the Nazis not to pull his art down. Instead, starting in nineteen forty-one, he was forbidden from painting. Some of his paintings went into what they called the Degenerate Art Exhibition.”
Eli fell silent. Irina looked at the painting, and her initial thought that the reds looked like blood seemed even more appropriate. “What does it mean that it’s here?”
Jasper cleared his throat. “This makes everything a bit
more complicated, wouldn’t you say?”
Eli nodded in agreement. “The Rodin would have been confiscated by the ERR. It had value to them. Pieces like this,” he gestured to the Nolde painting, “were considered disgusting. In nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen thirty-nine, many of the most valuable pieces of modernist art were sold at auction to international collectors. Joseph Goebbels famously said that at least they should be able to make some money off the ‘garbage.’”
“A Picasso. A Van Gogh. That’s what they were auctioning off as garbage.” Jasper surged to his feet and began pacing.
Eli continued in his calm professor tone. “Dealers tried to sell off the rest, but no one who otherwise might have liked the art dared go near Berlin, and everyone in Germany now firmly believed the art was garbage.” Eli paused once again, collecting himself. “On March 20th, 1939, nearly five thousand pieces of art were burned in the courtyard of the Berlin fire department. It is probably the single greatest loss of modernist art in history. But we know not everything the Nazis took and labeled as degenerate burned. Pieces started showing up after the war. Despite the party line about modernist art degrading good German society, high-ranking Nazi officials took pieces for their own private collections. Some of it was smuggled out by art lovers.”
Irina shifted to lean against Eli, who wrapped an arm around her.
“Whoever owns the Rodin owns this piece too?” Irina asked.
“We should assume so. And we can assume they know its provenance, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to pull it from the exhibit.”
“It would have been risky to hang it at all.” Jasper plopped down beside Irina. “A Rodin is actually less likely to raise any alarms. Something like a Nolde… I’m an archaeologist, not an art historian, but if I’d seen it, first of all I would have known it was a Nolde, and secondly, I would have wondered how it survived. How it got out of Germany.”
“I agree,” Eli said. “A charity event with art scholars in attendance is not a smart place to show off such a recognizable piece.”
“Then why did they offer this art up as part of the exhibit?”
No one had the answer to that question.
“Have you opened the others?” Irina asked.
“I don’t think my heart can take it,” Jasper said. He moved the Nolde to the side, then lay the crate flat and carefully fitted the painting back inside, replacing the lid.
Eli climbed to his feet, but not before kissing Irina’s head almost absently. Ah well, at least he remembered she was there. Considering the magnitude of the art discovery they had, that was actually quite the compliment.
Eli slid the second frame-sized box out of the cage-turned-storage-locker. “If this is the missing Metzinger or Gleizes, I’m going to… I’m not actually sure what I’ll do.”
Jasper made semi-incoherent noises of agreement. Eli laid the box flat on the floor then carefully undid the small latches on all four sides, before lifting the lid.
They crowded around, all of them on their knees.
“Huh.” Jasper sat back. “Well that’s anticlimactic.”
This crate held a faded line drawing that looked like an architectural schematic. Lines over lines, as if the paper had been reused, or as if the drafter had changed their mind halfway through, and decided to go with an entirely different design. The blueprint was mounted under glass, held in a thin gold frame.
Irina pointed to the frame. “The frames match.”
Eli nodded. “You’re right.”
“That means that, at some point, these were displayed together.” Jasper sat back, eyeing the three remaining crates.
“Maybe this is a map of somewhere in Germany. Berlin?”
“Wait, is that a signature?” Irina pointed, then bent down to peer at it. “No, it’s initials. C…CFM?”
Eli and Jasper started listing off artists it could be or places the blueprint might represent. Irina, slightly bored, snuck out to get some coffee. She held her breath when she reached the dining room, but it was empty. She poked around until she found a room service tray in one of the buffet’s drawers. She filled the tray with plates of brunch food and cups of coffee, returning to their room.
Eli and Jasper had moved on to the sculpture crates. The Rodin was out, set carefully on top of its crate. Beside that was a second sculpture. It was a tall, slender figure, wearing a robe or coat that fell in angular folds to the figure’s feet, which were incredibly detailed, each toe perfect. It had exaggerated features, with vertical slashes for eyes, yet somehow it was delicate and subtle. The way the head tilted and the hands lay over the chest made her think the figure was female.
“It’s a Barlach. It has to be,” Eli whispered, as if he were afraid to wake the sculpture.
“So is this one.” Jasper had the top off the final box. Eli crawled over to peer inside.
Irina carried the tray over to the low ottoman, setting it down. “I have breakfast,” she called out.
They continued to mutter to each other. Irina fiddled with the food for another second to see if they’d respond. When they didn’t, she made her voice as sultry as she could. “I’m naked and waiting for you.”
Conversation paused, and in the next second they were both there, jerking aside the tent-like hangings.
“You’re cruel, woman,” Jasper said when he saw her fully clothed and eating a pancake.
“I brought you bacon and coffee.”
“Hmm, you’re forgiven.”
Eli looked back at the art.
“Sit,” she said. “Eat.”
Eli dropped down onto a cushion and started shoveling food into his mouth like a little kid rushing through dinner so he could go back outside to play before the sun went down.
When Irina and Jasper’s plates were half empty, and Eli’s nearly cleaned, Irina raised her hand, like she was a student in class.
“Professor Wexler, I believe there’s a question.”
Jasper grinned at her.
Eli looked up, chunk of melon halfway to his mouth. He lowered his fork. “Yes…Miss Gentry, is it?”
Irina clasped her hands together just below her boobs, making them swell above the neckline of her top. “Oh my gosh, your class is just like, my favorite.”
Jasper snort-laughed. Eli’s lips twitched. “You had a question?”
Irina dropped the act. “Does what’s in those crates change anything?”
Eli frowned. “I’m not sure. We were supposed to identify pieces from the ERR album. I want to compare the Rodin against the image, but I’m ninety percent sure we’re right.” He ate the melon, thinking. “We assumed that the security detail was there protecting the Rodin, but the Nolde and the Barlach pieces are actually far more controversial. On one hand, they might have been smuggled out of Germany by dedicated art lovers. On the other, they might have gone into the private collections of Nazi leaders, and then after the war, they were hidden or smuggled out of Germany by their families or by sympathizers.”
Jasper was nodding. “If it was me, I would have been protecting those pieces, not the Rodin.”
“Then why bring them to the warehouse at all?” Irina asked.
Eli shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. And why let a picture of the Rodin be included in the event invitation?”
“The Rodin is safe to show off. Without the ERR album, there’s no evidence of where the Rodin came from. It’s not one of his large pieces.”
“True, true.” Eli slid his plate onto the tray. “We need more information.”
“Let’s wait until the Grand Master takes care of Price Bennett.” Irina spoke slowly to emphasis her point. “It’s not worth the risk.”
Jasper and Eli looked at her. Then at one another.
“What about a library computer?” Eli asked.
“Works for me,” Jasper agreed.
“What did I just say?”
“You can come with us, keep us safe.” Eli grinned at her.
Irina was prepared to
keep them there—by whatever means necessary—if she really thought there was extreme danger, but they’d been careful so far. And another few days stuck in this room would drive her nuts. She was already feeling a bit antsy. Better to take a chance on going out now.
They must have seen acquiescence in her features, because Eli jumped to his feet. “Good. Let’s go.”
“How about you put on some real pants there, big guy,” Jasper said.
Eli looked down at his pajamas.
“Pants. Good idea.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jasper adjusted his grip slightly and angled the Nolde canvas toward the light from the window. Eli, hunched down to minimize his shadow, snapped away with the small disposable camera Irina had picked up. While they’d been at the library, she’d run into the massive craft store that shared a parking lot with the library, a park, and several other businesses. They’d driven nearly an hour away from the hotel to a rather haphazard small town on the Oklahoma/Texas border. Eli and Jasper had hunkered down in the library while Irina ran to pick up cotton gloves. The rubber ones they’d used that morning weren’t ideal for handling art.
Irina ended up buying two massive bags of stuff at the craft store, but had been weirdly cagey when Jasper asked what she got. When they made it back to the hotel, Irina had pulled out the cheap digital camera and handed it to them. Eli had looked like he was about to cry with happiness.
He and Eli were doing their best to take archival shots. They needed to talk about what they’d discovered with the surface-level internet searching. Jasper would have given several toes to be able to turn on his phone and have the internet at his fingertips, or even better, to have his computer, which had access to Alexandria, one of the massive art databases used by museums.
Those things would have to wait. They’d decided taking the photos was priority number one, so that’s what they were focusing on. Once that was done, they’d talk.
They’d considered taking the Nolde out of the frame to photograph the edges, but they didn’t have the right equipment. The plan had been for Jasper to work the camera while Eli held the frames, but Eli got too nervous.
