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SEVEN

Angry at Rafiq’s presu his expansive penthouse, upset but unable to relax All this tiht I had found a fantastic deal, but I should have known it was too good to be true Of course a playboy like Rafiq was going to try and get whatever he could out ofa neoman

My anger felt like it was going to hit a boiling point, until I abruptly reed out of a pants and a T-shirt, the outfit I usually slept in, and the least valuable clothing I had brought to Rafiq’s On a hunch, I snooped around further inside the cabinets of the painting room, and found spotless, brand-new painter’s robes to put over my clothes

It occurred to ht of everything to put in the painting rooe person wouldn’t have thought of But then, he probably just hired soether, just like he hired me to fix his problems with his father

All the assu a capable, successful businessirl’s fantasies, now Rafiq was just another trust fund kid trying to have his cake and eat it too, access daddy’s fortune without any of the responsibility or pressure it took to earn the

He was the opposite of everything I was: spoiled, entitled, and ungrateful He threw morean honest person and living his life in soet around the rules How y had he wasted on sche honest with his father?

He , and while the sensation wasn’t totally unwelcome, the context certainly was He ht that our arrange to transfor

I stuffedblack hair into a hair tie to keep it out of h the sizes and shapes of canvases that were stacked against the wall, and eventually settled on a tall rectangle, which I placed vertically on the biggest easel in the rooave ht about Rafiq: the sensation of falling, of si trapped in a thin moment of time where I couldn’t tell which end was up

I e and e roo, lost as I was in creating the dark, toxic gradient out of deep blues and grays on the canvas My strokes were thicker than usual because the muscles of my arm were full of adrenaline, but I didn’t try to correct thery; that was exactly the way ht now

I ; I certainly hadn’t heard the buzzer froainst the canvas to apply white detail with a thin horsehair brush, the next, I started at the sound of ru room

I jerked forward, startled, andpaint across rowl, I threw s and stalked to the living roo in the penthouse