Renzo felt the city’s heat on his back and the Patron’s shadow on his neck—so he spun the silver ring and pocketed the key.
The night after Marcel vanished into the rain, Renzo found himself backstage in his own life—half dressed, half awake, caught between reflection and performance. The mirror in the hotel’s bathroom had shown three faces that weren’t there: Marcel’s, Jules’s, and the man he used to be. By dawn, he was walking the canals, the city’s wet light clinging to him like a role he couldn’t yet shed. That was the last night he thought he might still escape the story.
Renzo felt the city first: the bite of cool air along the canal, the bruise-blue sheen on wet pavement, a weak neon sign flickering its red vowels across the glass. He stood outside the gallery longer than he had planned, watching his reflection blur into the window display. Inside: three pieces mounted in a clean white row, a triptych of someone’s idea of control—hands, necks, mouths—each composition cropped just short of confession. It was the sort of curation that wanted to be a secret. It was the sort of curation that knew exactly how to be found.
He spun his ring once, twice. The gesture had become a metronome for restraint. Sometimes he still caught himself listening for Jules’s voice in quiet rooms, as if the man had become part of the acoustics—a frequency that only guilt could tune.
He hadn’t meant to find companions again, not after Jules. But the city had its own gravity, and two men had managed to pull him back toward the surface. Xander first—a quiet man who could stand in a storm without needing to fix it. Then Sebastian, who moved through life like a dare he expected everyone to take. They had arrived on different nights but stayed for the same reason: they saw him when he wasn’t performing. Somehow, the three of them had built something that felt both fragile and fierce, a life balanced on the edge of old secrets and new warmth.
“Are we going in,” Sebastian asked behind him, “or are we pretending we never came?”
Renzo turned; Sebastian’s collar was turned up against the wind, eyes lit with that playful heat that always threatened to become a dare. Xander stood just beside him, quieter, shoulders squared to the night. Xander carried warmth the way some men carried knives—every movement was intention; every glance, a promise not to hurt unless it mattered.
“We’re going in,” Renzo said. “If something’s being shown, I need to know what.”
“Need or want?” Sebastian’s mouth tilted. “Because your definition has been slippery lately.”
Xander’s gaze touched Renzo and stayed. “It’s okay to want.”
Renzo pressed his palm to the door. “It’s okay to be cautious.”
Inside, the gallery felt like the inside of a pearl—muted light, curated hush, white wine in clear stems that caught the room’s whisper. The triptych revealed itself as they crossed the floor: not hands, not necks, not mouths, exactly, but suggestions of each—skin as landscape, the grain of a throat lit like a horizon at dusk, an open mouth that contained more prayer than plea. Whoever made them understood intimacy the way a thief understands locks.
“Do you recognize the work?” Xander murmured.
Renzo took too long to answer. “I recognize the impulse.”
A woman in a satin blazer drifted by, left a scent of bergamot. “The artist remains anonymous,” she told them without being asked. “That’s part of the charm.”
“Charm is something you pin to your wrist,” Sebastian said. “This feels like a dare.”
“Dares sell,” she said, and floated away to someone with a louder watch.
Renzo stepped closer. In the leftmost piece the light brushed a scar he knew, small as a hyphen, below a collarbone. He could taste the room turn colder.
“Renzo?” Xander’s voice was soft, but the question inside it wasn’t.
He lifted his hand as if to touch the frame, stopped himself. “It’s nothing.”
The ring turned—one, two.
A man laughed across the gallery, the kind of low, smoke-laden sound that coiled through memory. Renzo didn’t need to look to know who it belonged to, but he looked anyway: a silver-threaded suit, a tie the color of old wine, gold cufflinks catching the light like teeth. Marcel. Age had softened nothing; if anything, he had found a more careful polish. He was speaking to the curator, not touching her, but the space between them was occupied as surely as if he had placed a hand at her back.
Sebastian’s posture sharpened. “We can leave.”
Xander said nothing. He didn’t have to. His hand found Renzo’s wrist; a steadying, not a capture.
Marcel noticed them on cue—of course he did—and drew a line through the room just by turning his body. He approached as though the floor were meant for it.
“Vale,” Marcel said, his accent opening the name and closing it again. “The art world is small. Or perhaps I am only very lucky.”
Luck. The word sank like a coin in Renzo’s stomach.
“Marcel.” Renzo rolled the name around his mouth as if testing it for poison. “Small world.”
Marcel smiled. “Your taste has improved.” His eyes took in Xander, then Sebastian, an appreciative pause placed where other men might have spilled cruelty. “Friends?”
“Lovers,” Sebastian said without blinking.
Marcel’s approval was subtle, a shift at the corners of his mouth. “Ah. A trio. Very Roman.”
“Marcel,” Renzo said, “what are you doing here?”
“A better question,” Marcel said, tilting his head toward the triptych, “is what are you doing here. Admiring nostalgia? Or shopping for something you’ve misplaced?”
Renzo felt the blood move at his temples. The leftmost piece held the hyphen-scar like a word no one was allowed to say. He could not decide whether to be flattered or afraid.
Xander’s voice came even. “If you have something to say to Renzo, say it where I can hear it.”
Marcel looked genuinely delighted. “How rare. Men who stand beside a man, not in front of him.” He inclined his head, gracious to the point of mockery. “Another time, perhaps. I try not to conduct business on opening nights.”
“Business?” Renzo said softly. The ring turned. “We don’t have any.”
“Don’t we?” Marcel allowed his gaze to rest on Renzo’s hand. “You used to spin that ring when you owed me an answer. Some habits are so faithful.”
He brushed past them with a touch that wasn’t a touch, leaving a faint wake of expensive smoke. Sebastian cursed under his breath. Xander’s hand on Renzo’s wrist warmed.
“You’re not alone,” Xander said. “Whatever this is, we’re not leaving you to it.”
Renzo swallowed. “That might be exactly why he’s here.”
They didn’t stay for the speeches. Outside, the night had sharpened; the street held the metallic taste of rain that couldn’t commit. Sebastian flagged a car with a whistle and a grin he didn’t feel. Back at the loft, everything took on a top-note of vigilance—the way Renzo locked the door, the way Sebastian checked the windows, the way Xander turned on only half the lamps as if brightness itself could be bait.
The loft was an archive of their days: canvases leaning against brick, framed photographs in a neat stack that no one had hung yet, a long table scarred with paint and ringed by coffee. Renzo’s camera sat where he’d left it, lens capped, strap curled like a sleeping animal. He removed the cap and lifted the camera, looking at the two men through the glass first. The act of framing them calmed him.
“Hold still,” he said.
Sebastian laughed. “Since when do we hold still for you?”
“Since right now.” Renzo adjusted the focus, drew them into a line, then a curve. Xander’s palm landed at the back of Sebastian’s neck; Sebastian’s mouth softened. The shutter clicked—a heartbeat given mechanical sound.
The second shot tasted like promise; the third, like relief. He lowered the camera and they were there, close enough for space to feel like a choice, not a sentence. Xander stepped in first. His kiss was the slow kind that started in his hands—fingertips at Renzo’s jaw, thumbs ghosting his cheekbones—before his mouth found Renzo’s mouth and opened it. Sebastian pressed in from the other side, laughter caught in his throat like a spark. Everything in the room pulled tighter, drew heat.
“Tell me what you need,” Xander whispered against Renzo’s mouth.
“You,” Renzo said, surprised he could say anything. “Both of you.”
“Then take,” Sebastian murmured, and the laughter in his voice burned to something else.
They found the long table first, backs of knees clearing brushes and a half-finished sketch, the wood warm under Renzo’s hands. He moved as if he’d been starved of touch, because maybe he had—starved of touch that wasn’t currency. And here it wasn’t. Here, Xander mapped him like an old city learned by foot; Sebastian marked him like a song he was determined to get right.
Renzo had always measured intimacy by the scale of what it could ruin. Tonight it measured itself by what it could save. He let himself be ungenerous with restraint, let himself be taken in the way that felt like offering, not surrender. Their mouths drew new language along his throat, his shoulders; their hands insisted he remember his own edges. It wasn’t spectacle; it wasn’t exhibition. It was a private gallery where every piece knew its maker and was loved for the scars.
When they finally stilled, the table averted its eyes dutifully, the lamps hummed as if to cool the air. Renzo breathed the way a man breathes after surfacing—slow, grateful, incredulous.
“Better?” Sebastian asked, completely unrepentant.
Renzo nodded, throat thick. “You two are—”
“Not going anywhere,” Xander finished for him.
Renzo wiped a sheen of sweat from his lip and tried to laugh. It came out as a sound he didn’t name. “He won’t stop.”
“Then we won’t either,” Sebastian said. “Let him try to buy your shadow. He doesn’t get your daylight.”
Renzo wanted to believe that. He did. He showered with the water almost too hot, watched it steam away the last of the gallery smell from his skin. When he came back to the table, his camera waited. He scrolled through the three frames, each one a small astonishment: Xander’s hand at Sebastian’s neck; Sebastian’s eyes half-closed with mischief and devotion; Renzo in the mirror behind them, not quite visible, but present—the curve of a shoulder, the edge of a jaw, the ring caught in mid-turn.
He set the camera down and found the small metal lockbox he kept tucked behind the bookshelf. Old habit. Inside: a flash drive, a thin coil of negatives sleeved in protective plastic, and a folded note in a hand he had loved once because it looked like music. Jules. He didn’t open the note. He didn’t need to. For a moment he wondered if Jules had known it would come to this—if that note had been less comfort and more map. Marcel had taken the photographs, but Jules had taken the truth and hidden it somewhere Renzo hadn’t yet looked. The words had worn grooves in his skull: You are more than what they pay for. But only if you stop letting them pay.
His phone lit up before he could put the box away. No number. Just a line of text that found him with surgical efficiency:
Vale. You still spin the ring when you lie. Coffee tomorrow, 9 A.M., Café L’Aube. Or I show the fourth piece at a private view tonight. — M
Renzo read it twice. A fourth piece. He hadn’t known there was a fourth piece. He should have prepared for there to be a fourth piece.
He felt the old panic rise, rapid and uncoordinated. His hands went cold. Xander saw the color move out of his face and was beside him without ceremony.
“What did he say?”
Renzo passed him the screen. Sebastian leaned his hip against the table and read over Xander’s shoulder, then turned to Renzo.
“Is there a fourth piece?” Sebastian asked, careful.
“I never printed it,” Renzo said. “I never—” He stopped. Memory rearranged itself with the patience of a predator. The night he’d sworn he destroyed the last of them—the hotel room on Rue du Bac, Jules asleep with one hand open on the sheet, the window leaking early light. Marcel had come a day later with champagne and a promise Renzo hadn’t recognized as a threat.
“Okay,” Xander said. “Then either he’s bluffing, or he has something else—outtakes, contact sheets, a frame you forgot.”
Renzo closed the lockbox and slid it back behind the shelf. “He doesn’t bluff. He bids.”
“Then we outbid him,” Sebastian said.
Renzo almost smiled. “With what?”
“Not money.” Sebastian tapped the camera. “With narrative. If he wants to make you a scandal, we make you a story. Show your work on your terms, before he can weaponize it.”
Xander nodded. “We control the light.”
Renzo stared at them both, that mixture of terror and gratitude expanding until it pressed against his ribs from the inside. “And if the fourth piece is… If it’s the one I think it is—”
“Then we decide together,” Xander said simply. “You are not a court by yourself.”
Sebastian reached and stole the phone, typed back before Renzo could protest: We’ll take the coffee. He hit send with a flourish and a wink that didn’t quite hide the worry in his eyes.
“Seb—”
“We need information,” Sebastian said. “You’ve been starving yourself on dread, baby. Eat data.”
Renzo laughed, helpless. “I hate how much sense you make when you’re impossible.”
“That’s my best trait,” Sebastian said. “Second best is that I am very pretty when people are awful.”
Xander’s mouth had been held in a line; now it softened. He curled a hand around the back of Renzo’s neck, thumb finding the small knot of tension there and easing it as if he’d been born to. “We go together tomorrow.”
Renzo shook his head. “He’ll use you against me.”
“Then he can watch us choose each other,” Xander said. “Let him learn a new economy.”
Night stretched. They didn’t sleep much. Renzo lay between the men who had become his compass, the city’s sounds moving through the windows like the tide. He watched the ceiling and mapped the old fault lines: the hotel corridors with their long carpets, the limo rides where curtains fluttered like backstage drapes, the ateliers that smelled like varnish and secrets. He wanted to be the man who could walk into the café in the morning and be unafraid. He wanted to be the man who never needed to sell a piece of himself again.
Next On Renzo: After Hours:
A velvet-lettered envelope arrives with an address Renzo swore he’d never step into again. Jules leaves a voice message that sounds like a confession. And the fourth piece finally appears—but not in a frame, and not on a wall.
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