The acrid scent of turpentine and linseed oil surrounded Sarah like a familiar skin as she stepped into Lucas's studio. Morning light streamed through the tall windows, casting sun-dancing dust motes that fluttered like sleepy fireflies around his easel.

She froze in the doorway.

The blank canvas looked like she did—but not like she looked now. The figure in the painting wore Emily's blue dress, her hand tracing down the gnarled trunk of the hawthorn tree. The brushstrokes were loose, the colors nearly tawdry, as if the scene seeped through time itself.

Lucas spun, paint-stained hands scrubbing across denim. His sleeves were rolled up on his elbows, and Sarah saw the new pale scar she remembered from Thomas's portrait, a white line as thin as a scratch along his forearm where a dueling saber had scratched him.

Two hundred years ago.

"You've arrived." His tone was rough with sleeplessness.

Sarah tracked the line of the canvas. "When did you do this?"

"Last night. Woke up at 3 AM with my hands covered in ultramarine." He gestured to her, extending his hands, the blue paint still clinging to his cuticles. "Couldn't stop until the light changed."

Her body convulsed. She had felt the exact same unnatural urge drive her to draw in her own notebook until dawn—page after page of Thomas's face, sketched in smudges of charcoal that left her fingers black-stained.

Lucas stepped in, heat of his body radiating through the light cotton of her top. "There's something more." He returned to a prior canvas propped against the wall.

Sarah's breath stopped.

The painting showed the moonlit garden of Emily's diary, but the forms were unclear—foggy figures wrapped in one another's arms. But the emotion was achingly real: the bow of a spine folding into the reach of loving hands, the tormented tip of two foreheads meeting.

"I.d started this the day before we met." Lucas's thumb.d the bottom corner where the paint thickened like blood that clotted. "I had no idea who they were. I just knew—" His voice broke. "I knew I'd die if I couldn't finish it."

Sarah grasped his hand. The moment their skin touched, the studio walls.pped away—

—Thomas's studio, though smaller, as north lighted as the other—Emily's smile as she wiped a smudge of vermilion off his cheek—

—"You carry paint in your soul," she taunted, sucking color off her thumb—

—His low rumble as he leaned her against the pigment-stained table—

The vision snapped apart at Lucas's phone buzzing violently. A text from Dr. Voss:

Test results back. Lockets contain human blood. Yours, Lucas.

Sarah’s knees buckled. Lucas caught her around the waist, his grip identical to Thomas’s in her vision. The studio walls seemed to breathe around them, the unfinished paintings whispering secrets in colors that hadn’t been invented in 1784.

"We’re not imagining this," Lucas murmured against her temple.

Outside, the first snow of winter began to fall—though the hawthorn tree’s branches dripped with thick, scarlet sap.