Chapter 2: Blank Canvas
The Abattoir at four in the morning was quiet in the way only very old, very expensive houses could be quiet. Kol let them in through a side door, past a courtyard with a fountain, and up a wide staircase that he took two at a time while Iris trailed her fingers along the banister and left faint green sparks in the varnish.
"Rules of the house," Kol said, pushing open a set of tall doors. "Don't touch Elijah's books. Don't drink Rebekah's wine unless she offers. And whatever you do in here, don't blame me when my brothers find out."
"In here" was a cavernous studio. High ceilings, exposed brick, canvases leaning everywhere in ranks like a very tidy army. The air smelled of turpentine and linseed and something older, something that had dried into the floorboards over decades. Lanterns burned low and gold along the walls, and in the middle of it all stood an easel with a blank canvas on it, pristine, waiting, spotlit like an altar.
Iris walked in and her whole body went reverent for about four seconds.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, Kol. This is a crime scene waiting to happen."
"That," Kol said, leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed, "is my brother Klaus's studio. He paints in here. He broods in here. He once daggered a man in here, though that was more of an aesthetic choice."
"He paints." Iris drifted down the rank of canvases, trailing sparks. Landscapes. A storm over a city. A woman's back, luminous. A wolf mid-howl, rendered in furious strokes of gold. "The scowling brother paints."
"He's very particular about his studio."
"So you keep saying." She stopped in front of a stack of untouched canvases and ran her hand over the top one, feeling the tooth of the fabric. Then she looked at the jars of paint lined up on the workbench. Cadmium red. Ultramarine. A gold so rich it looked edible. Something in her face went from mischief to architecture.
"Kol," she said. "How attached is your brother to this room?"
"Emotionally. Not physically. The floor is polished concrete, it scrubs."
"Good." She turned around, and there it was, the full green-eyed weight of her attention, the look that had gotten half of Hogsmeade into trouble. "I have a better idea than redecorating."
"Better than filling his paint pots with itching powder? I confess I'd scheduled that for your second visit."
"Better." She stepped out of her heels, which made her even more absurdly small, four foot ten of neon pink dress and powdered sugar, and pointed at the big blank canvas on the easel. "That's a painting that hasn't happened yet."
"It's a canvas, little storm cloud."
"It's a canvas that needs bodies." She pulled her wand and flicked it. The canvas came off the easel and floated gently down to spread flat on the concrete floor, dead centre of the studio, like a fallen flag. She flicked again and the easel clattered politely into a corner. "There. Now it's happening."
Kol looked at the canvas. He looked at her. A thousand years of appetite stirred behind his eyes and settled into something delighted and deliberate.
"You want to shag on my brother's blank canvas," he said, "in my brother's studio, and leave the result for him to find."
"I want to make art." She reached behind her neck and found the zip of her dress. "Specifically, I want to make art out of the two of us, in his paint, on his floor, hanging in his studio, and I want it to be technically brilliant and emotionally devastating. Like everything else I do."
The dress came down. She stepped out of it and stood in the lantern light in nothing at all, because of course she was wearing nothing under it, small and pale and freckled, red hair falling loose over her shoulders, and Kol crossed the room in about a heartbeat and a half.
"You have no knickers on," he observed.
"It's four in the morning. Who am I dressing for, God?" She grabbed a fistful of his Henley and pulled. "Off. You're wearing too many clothes for the medium."
He let her strip it over his head, laughing. "The medium."
"Body paint, Mikaelson. Keep up." She was already at the workbench, popping lids, uncapping tubes of colour with her teeth. She squeezed a long ribbon of cadmium red into her palm and held up her hand, dripping. "Arms out."
Kol spread his arms like a man being measured for a bespoke suit. She painted him in long, greedy strokes, red down his chest, her small palms dragging colour over the hard planes of him, gold along his collarbones, her fingers dipping into the hollow of his throat. His skin ran warm under her hands, that fake heartbeat finally doing its job, picking up, ticking faster the longer she touched him.
"Your pulse is up," she noted, painting the ridges of his stomach.
"You have paint on my nipple and I have lived a thousand years," Kol said. "Allow me some dignity."
"No." She dipped her whole hand in ultramarine and pressed it flat against his sternum, leaving a perfect blue handprint, then dragged it down over his ribs, watching the colour catch in the light. "Hold still. Masterpiece in progress."
"I'm the canvas?"
"You're half the medium. Shut up and hold still." She painted him thoroughly, unhurried, working the colour into him like a woman kneading dough, and by the time she stepped back he was a smouldering mosaic of red and gold and blue from throat to hip, and there was a very obvious shape straining at the front of his trousers that no amount of artistic focus had stopped her noticing.
"Your turn," Kol said, voice gone rough. He picked up a tube of gold.
"I'm the primary colour, obviously," Iris said, backing onto the canvas like a cat claiming a chair.
"Obviously."
He squeezed gold into his palm and caught her by the waist, and his hands were everywhere at once, and Iris discovered that a thousand-year-old vampire applied paint the way he did everything else, with total confidence and no permission. Gold down her spine. Red across her hip. Blue between her breasts, smeared up over her collarbone while his thumb pressed just under her jaw, tipping her chin up. Her skin tingled everywhere he touched, paint-slick and warm, and the smell of linseed oil mixed with the smell of her and it went straight down her body like liquor.
She was soaked in colour and grinning like an idiot when he finally stepped back to look at her.
"Exquisite," he said.
"You're going to ruin it," she warned, which was true, and also the point.
"On three," Kol said, and lifted her clean off her feet.
She shrieked with laughter as he brought her down onto the canvas with him, and they hit it together, paint smearing, bodies sliding, and his mouth found hers before she'd finished laughing. He kissed the way he'd painted, thorough, greedy, one hand fisting into her red hair while the other spread across her back and dragged her down his body, pressing her paint-soaked chest against his, mixing their colours where their skin met. She bit his lower lip hard enough that even a vampire felt it and groaned into her mouth.
"Violent little thing," he panted.
"Chaos gremlin," she corrected, and rolled them over.
The canvas was enormous and slick beneath them, and every movement of their bodies left a mark, streaks of gold and red and blue that their hips dragged into spirals. Iris sat up astride him, palms flat on his paint-slick chest, and rolled her hips down and he swore in a language that hadn't been spoken in centuries. She reached between them, popped the button on his trousers one-handed, and had him out in her fist, thick and hot and already hard, paint smearing from her fingers onto his skin.
"Hello," she said appreciatively.
"Modest, too."
She spat in her palm, spread him wet, and stroked him slowly, watching his face come apart. His head tipped back, throat bared, and she leaned down and licked a stripe of gold off his collarbone and then bit it, not gently, and his hips bucked up into her hand hard enough that she giggled against his skin.
"Please," Kol said, "continue taking liberties."
"That's the whole business model." She shifted up, held him steady, and sank down onto him in one long, deliberate slide that made them both swear. The stretch burned sweet, her body opening around him inch by inch, and she went all the way down until she was seated flush against him, full, gasping, her thighs trembling where they pressed into his paint-slick hips.
"Bloody hell," Kol gritted, hands flying to her waist, gripping hard enough to leave marks. "You're, Christ, you're tight."
"Four foot ten. Everything's compact." She braced on his chest and started to move, slow at first, rolling her hips, and every movement dragged their bodies across the canvas beneath them. She could feel the fabric sliding under her knees, could hear the wet sounds of skin and paint, and the thought of what they were leaving behind on that pristine white surface, exactly what their bodies were printing there, made her clench around him and Kol's whole face went feral.
"Keep doing that," he demanded.
"Doing what?" She clenched again, deliberately, and ground down in a slow circle.
"That." His hands tightened on her waist and he took over, snapping his hips up into her, and the rhythm he set was anything but polite. He fucked up into her hard and deep, and her small body bounced on him, paint squelching between their stomachs, her tits smeared gold and red bouncing with every thrust. She grabbed her own hair out of the way with one fist and gave him a full view, head back, mouth open, moaning loud and shameless in the middle of her enemy's brother's art studio.
"God, yes, like that, fuck me," she gasped. "Harder, Mikaelson, I won't break, I promise. I've survived worse than your cock."
"Have you?" He flipped them without slowing, an easy rolling surge that put her on her back in the middle of the canvas with a wet slap, him between her thighs, driving in deep. His weight pinned her. His mouth found her throat and he bit down, and the sharp sting of it made her cry out and rake her nails down his painted back, dragging blue through red, leaving welts that healed in seconds.
She could feel the moment building low in her belly, coil tightening with every deep stroke, his pubic bone grinding against her clit on every thrust, paint and sweat and spit, and she wrapped her legs around his back and met him thrust for thrust like she was trying to win.
"Touch yourself," Kol ordered, mouth at her ear.
"Kinky," she managed, "for a first date," and did it anyway, fingers sliding down between their bodies, finding herself slick and swollen, rubbing fast circles while he fucked her. The studio filled with the sound of it, bodies slapping, her moans bouncing off the brick walls, his breath ragged, the wet creak of canvas being well and truly ruined.
"Kol, Kol, I'm going to," she said, and the orgasm ripped through her, back arching clean off the canvas, thighs clamping around him, and she screamed his name with zero regard for the acoustics of a house full of ancient vampires. He rode her through it, pace punishing, until she was shaking and limp and giggling, and then he flipped her over onto her hands and knees, dragged her hips back, and pushed into her again from behind.
"Again," he said.
"Greedy."
"You screamed my name loud enough to wake the dead. Literally, in this house. I'd like an encore."
He fucked her like that, one hand fisted in her hair and the other gripping her hip hard enough to bruise, and she loved it, loved the sting and the depth and the filth of it, pushing back onto him, moaning into the canvas, her breath fogging the white fabric. Their bodies had printed themselves into it, an abstract of gold and red limbs, a smear where her face had been pressed, the dark wet bloom where their hips met. She came a second time with her teeth sunk into her own forearm and a string of swearing that would have made Madam Pomfrey faint, and Kol finally followed, driving in deep one last time and coming inside her with a groan torn from somewhere ancient, collapsing over her back, both of them paint-soaked and gasping in the wreckage of the canvas.
For a while there was just breathing, and the smell of turpentine and sex.
Iris turned her head, cheek against the painted canvas, and surveyed the result. It was, genuinely, something. Limbs in gold and blue, a chaos of red, bodies mapped in streaks and smears, a shape at the centre that might have been a storm or a woman or both. Abstract, violent, alive.
"Kol," she said. "I think we're geniuses."
He lifted his head, looked at the canvas beneath them, and started to laugh, that helpless wheezing laugh from the café.
"That is either the best or the worst thing Niklaus has ever owned," he said, "and I am hanging it in the front hall."
"Can we sign it?" She already had her finger in the gold paint. "Ass print for me. You do a handprint. It's a collaboration."
"It's a declaration of war."
"It's a legacy," Iris corrected, pressing her golden handprint into the corner, then wiggling her hips, settling more comfortably on top of him, entirely unbothered by what that did to the paint. "Besides, think of it as an introduction. Better than a calling card."
Somewhere above them, a floorboard creaked. One of the brothers, moving with vampire quiet, or trying to. Kol's grin went slow and wicked, and Iris felt his whole body go still with anticipation beneath hers.
"You know," he murmured, lips against her paint-slick shoulder, "I did tell you my family would come to meet you. I simply didn't specify the circumstances."
"How long do we have before the scowling one walks in?"
"On a night like this?" Kol listened, head tilted. "Minutes. Less, if Rebekah hears you screaming and comes to investigate whether someone's being murdered without her."
"Then hang on," Iris said, reaching back to grip his hip, "because I want to finish the signature properly."
The floorboard creaked again, closer, and Kol laughed and reached for the gold paint.