The Echo of Skin

Florence dripped with rain the night her painting returned to her.

The gallery was warm, lit with golden light and the low murmur of art collectors sipping wine. Glass clinked, heels tapped on marble. But Aanya Roy stood still in a black dress too plain for the occasion, her hands tucked behind her back, staring at a canvas that didn't belong to her anymore.

It was hers once. Painted in the middle of a breakdown—sleepless, grief-wrecked, with shaking fingers and an open wound where her father used to be. She had sold it to a stranger to afford rent. She never thought she'd see it again.

And yet, there it was.

A woman in the painting—faceless, nameless—stood with her back to the viewer. Her wrists were wrapped in red silk, not tight, but not free either. The skin around the fabric was pale, delicate. Vulnerable. There was no violence in it. Only surrender.

Aanya's throat tightened.

She hadn't meant to paint herself. But now, years later, staring at it under the glow of chandeliers and the eyes of strangers, she realized she had.

It was her.

And someone had brought it here tonight, to this private viewing, and placed it right in her path. Florence was full of ghosts, but this one felt too deliberate to be coincidence.

She shifted her weight and looked away.

Her memories always came like this. Uninvited. Vivid.

Age four. Sitting on her mother's lap, touching the silver bangle on her wrist. Her mother had smelled of jasmine. She died a few weeks later. Aanya never fully understood how. One day her mother was laughing, and the next, she was gone.

After that, it was just her and Baba.

Her father wasn't a loud man. He worked hard in a government office, came home late, and sometimes, when he thought she was asleep, he'd pull out a tattered sketchbook from a drawer and draw. Faces. Eyes.

He once told her, "If I had the courage, I'd have been an artist. But art doesn't feed you, his parents said. It only eats you alive."

He never tried.

At twenty-three, she applied—almost on impulse—to the Accademia di Arte e Restauro Firenze, a historic but lesser-known art program nestled in the shadow of Florence's grander institutions. She had filled out the application online one sleepless night, while her father snored lightly in the next room, unaware she'd even dared to dream of leaving.

The program was fiercely competitive, but she applied anyway, submitting her faded sketches and water-stained portfolio with little hope.

One month later, her father started coughing blood.

They thought it was a virus. It wasn't.

It was cancer, and the diagnosis came like a punch to the lungs. Treatment was possible—but costly. Too costly.

By the time they knew how bad it was, it was already over.

He died in the heat of April, his fingers still ink-stained from the bank ledger he worked on until the very end.

A week after his funeral, she received the letter.

"Congratulations. You've been awarded the Emerging Artisan Grant from the Accademia di Arte e Restauro Firenze."

It included access to a shared studio space, a subsidized residency slot, and a modest monthly living stipend—just enough to cover rent in a cramped apartment and the cheapest groceries Florence had to offer. No frills. No safety net. Just survival and paint.

Still, it felt like the universe had left her one last breadcrumb.

And even though she had nothing left in India—no family, no savings, not even the will to continue—she packed her brushes and left.

She told herself it was what her father would've wanted.

And sometimes, in quiet moments, she still believed that.

So she came.

She brought nothing but clothes, brushes, and a single photograph of her father, creased and fading. She lived in a tiny apartment with a leaking roof and cooked rice in a dented pot. She barely spoke the language. Some days, she didn't speak at all.

But Florence had her. And somehow, she was still breathing.

Aanya took one slow step toward the painting again. The red silk in it shimmered under the lights. People around her murmured praise, calling it "haunting" and "raw." One man asked his friend who the artist was. The other shrugged.

She didn't correct them. She never gave this gallery permission to display it.

She was about to walk away when she felt it.

A shift in the air.

The weight of someone watching her.

Her eyes lifted, scanning the room casually at first—then more deliberately.

And then she saw him.

Across the gallery, near the archway, stood a man in a black suit. His frame was tall, lean, motionless. The light struck the sharp angles of his face—high cheekbones, pale eyes, mouth unreadable. He held a glass of wine, but he hadn't touched it.

He was watching her.

Not the painting.

Her.

Their eyes met, and the gallery fell away.

There was nothing flirtatious in his gaze. No hunger. No invitation.

It was worse.

It was recognition.

Aanya felt her breath catch, her fingers curling around the clutch in her hand. She didn't look away. Neither did he.

Then, just like that, he turned and walked out of the gallery.

No words. No glance back.

Gone.

His name was Leonhart Moretti.

She didn't know it yet. But he knew hers.

Florence – 2 hours earlierPOV: Leonhart

Leonhart sat alone in the back seat of his car as rain traced slow, deliberate lines across the window. The city beyond was golden and blurred, like a half-finished oil painting. He didn't look at his phone. He didn't speak.

He was already thinking about her.

The gallery wasn't one he regularly visited, though it belonged to one of his holding companies—tucked discreetly beneath layers of shell names and foreign accounts. He didn't need to be present tonight. He didn't need to watch her.

But he wanted to.

The painting had been moved there three days ago. Hung without credit, without signature, exactly as he instructed. It had lived in his private collection for years—since the moment it appeared on a minor collector's auction site. He remembered the image instantly: red silk, bound wrists, faceless ache.

The girl behind it had applied for a scholarship then—Aanya Roy. Twenty-three. Indian. A haunted little portfolio full of charcoal ghosts and trembling skin. He remembered every stroke.

He didn't usually keep things. Not women. Not art. Not feelings.

But something about her work had unsettled him. Something about the way she painted restraint—as if she knew what it meant to surrender before she ever allowed herself to want it.

Now, years later, she was here.

And he had made sure the gallery would bring them back to the same room.

He didn't believe in fate. Only in Design. Control.

But Aanya Roy made him remember the day the sky tore open.

He was ten years old when the plane went down. His parents were gone before impact. He remembered the smell of burning leather. A stewardess's scream. The aftertaste of blood and smoke. And then silence—followed by years of being raised by men who taught him wealth, leverage, contracts, but not comfort.

He learned to survive through control. To want nothing. To need no one.

Until her.

He had only seen her from a distance tonight—quiet, still, unsure. But in that stillness, there was tension. Hunger, unexpressed.

She didn't know the gallery was his.

She didn't know the painting belonged to him now.

But she would.

Soon.

Return to Aanya

Back in the gallery, Aanya stood before the canvas, her expression unreadable. Her fingertips hovered just beneath the frame—close enough to feel the ghost of it, but not touching.

Behind her, people moved. Laughed. Drank. But she was somewhere else entirely.

She didn't know who had brought her past to the surface.

But deep in her chest, she felt a hum. A quiet warning.

Something had begun.

Something that would not be kind.

Final Line

Two souls, orphaned by time, scarred by silence—drawn to each other not by love, but by the echo of skin once touched in dreams.