I am Erika—the secret daughter of the Austrian painter whose name hung in the salons of Vienna, yet whose true life was a study in secrecy and control. My home was less a house than a gilded fortress: endless corridors that smelled faintly of turpentine and cedar, marble floors that echoed with the careful steps of servants who never met my eyes, and windows so tall they framed the mountains like paintings themselves. To anyone outside those walls, I did not exist. Never knew why until i figured out I was not aryan but this never seemed to be a problem. However I did not know exactly what he did to non-aryans I always questioned if I wasn’t his daughter what he would’ve done to me.

My world was bound by the garden walls and the will of my father. He said the world beyond was noisy, vulgar, full of people who would not understand our kind. So I stayed, watching the seasons change from behind the tall glass panes—sketching birches in winter and the heavy lilacs of spring, dreaming of how the air might feel if I could walk beyond the gates.

Uncle Benito was my warden and my teacher both. He was a soldier by bearing, with eyes as sharp as the buttons on his uniform, though he rarely wore one. He taught me English, Italian, and German with a discipline that bordered on cruelty, yet his voice softened when I got the pronunciation just right. “Precision is a virtue,” he would say, “in art as in life.” Sometimes, when my father was away, Benito would take me to the edge of the forest to practice marksmanship or silent movement—“for the sake of discipline,” he claimed. I excelled quickly, faster than he liked to admit. Even the guards, tall men with rifles and rigid backs, would exchange glances when I disarmed them during practice.

Aunt Isle Koch, also known as by my father “the bitch” was a strange contrast to them both. She moved through the halls in silks that whispered against the marble, her laughter echoing like broken glass. She taught me to observe people—to notice the small things: a tremor in a hand, the way a smile can hide a threat. She said that to survive in a gilded cage, one must first learn the art of performance.

And so I performed—the obedient daughter, the promising heir, the quiet girl in the shadows of masterpieces. But inside me, something restless grew. At night, when the moonlight fell like paint over the courtyard, I would stand by the barred balcony and imagine walking barefoot through the dew, the world unframed, uncurated, real.