The studio was a sanctuary and a madhouse. The air hummed with the smell of turpentine, oil, and something sharp, electric—the scent of sleepless nights and a disintegrating psyche. Canvases stood everywhere. They didn't hang on the walls—they grew from them, like crystals from the amnesia of the earth. On some, poisonous dreams had frozen: eyes sprouting from cracks in a mother-of-pearl sky, wings stitched to the sun with sinews. On others—a void so full it began to suck in the light.

Anthony stood before the easel. His hand, clutching a brush, vibrated like a seismograph needle predicting an eruption. But the canvas remained empty. He was blind. The genius, whose paintings sold for sums with six zeros, saw nothing but a gray veil of despair.

And then the idea was born. Not a thought, but a vortex, an intuitive breakthrough. He didn't need a model. He needed a muse. Not inspiration, but flesh through which this inspiration could pour onto the canvas. He found her on the street, leaving the gallery where his latest work was displayed. In her eyes, he read not admiration, but something greater—understanding? No, impossible. But potential. And that was enough.

Now she sat in a chair in the middle of the studio, tied up. He didn't think of the abduction as a crime. It was an act of creation, the procurement of necessary material. He looked at her, and his gaze was not that of a man looking at a woman, but that of a sculptor looking at a block of marble in which a future statue was already trapped.

"You don't understand," his voice was a hoarse whisper, directed more at the empty canvas than at her. "They buy the skin shed by the snake. They think that's the art. But art is the pain of shedding. The moment the skin cracks, and something new is born. I want to capture that moment. You will help me."

He moved closer, not seeing her tense back, not interpreting the silence. He saw only the play of light on her cheek, which suddenly seemed to him not a cheek, but the slope of a hill in a world that had not yet been created. The shadow under her chin was not a shadow, but an abyss leading to the core of his next masterpiece.

He grabbed a tube of paint—scarlet, like a fresh artery. He squeezed it onto the palette, and the sound was the only reply in the silence.

"They say I'm going mad," he continued, mixing the red with black, achieving the color of congealed blood. "But they are wrong. Madness is when you see the world as it is. Gray, flat, logical. And I... I see its skeleton. Its nerves. I see how the air screams and the stone sings. And now... now I am beginning to see you."

He turned to the canvas. His body shook. The transparent veil before his eyes dissipated, yielding to a vision—terrifying and beautiful. He saw her not as a woman, but as a structure—a intertwining of fear, resistance, and that very strange silence he had caught in her gaze. This was it.

His brush lunged at the canvas, leaving behind a furious, chaotic stroke. Then another. He wasn't painting her portrait. He was painting her essence, pulled from her like an electric discharge. He was painting the void that she filled in his rupturing consciousness.