“Okay Nico. Tell me what happened.”
Nico Vale sits in the studio like a stain that doesn’t belong to the room—too bright, too nervous, too wrong. I watch him the way I watch a painting I know is hiding a second image beneath the first layer of pigment. His guilt isn’t loud; it’s quiet, twitching at the edges of him, leaking through the cracks he can’t patch fast enough.
His hands are the first betrayal. Blue grey paint clings to his skin, still damp, still glossy. The exact shade from Revera’s hooded portrait. It’s not the kind of paint you get from “leaving early.” It’s the kind you get from touching a canvas that was supposed to be finished. He keeps trying to hide his fingers, curling them into fists, but the tremor gives him away—small, frantic, impossible to control.
His eyes won’t stay still. They flick to the portrait again and again, like he’s checking whether it still looks the way he left it. Every glance is a confession. Every swallow is a panic he can’t swallow down.
His backpack is half unzipped, and inside is a rag smeared with the same dark pigment. The strokes on it aren’t the neat wipes of an artist cleaning up after work—they’re frantic, uneven, the kind someone makes when they’re trying to erase something fast. Something incriminating.
When I mention the smeared signature, he flinches. Not a big movement—just a sharp, involuntary jerk, like the truth jabbed him in the ribs. He tries to mask it by looking at the floor, but his breathing betrays him again, shallow and uneven.
There’s a tightness in his shoulders, a stiffness in his spine, the posture of someone bracing for impact. He’s not grieving. He’s bracing. Preparing. Waiting for the moment everything collapses.
And when I bring up the smashed camera, the one Revera hid behind the bookshelf, Nico’s reaction is too fast eyes widening, breath catching, a flash of fear that doesn’t belong to innocence. He tries to play dumb, but his voice thins out, stretched too tight to be believable.
He’s a prodigy, yes. But right now, he’s a terrible liar.
Every detail around him feels like a brushstroke pointing toward the same conclusion: Nico Vale didn’t just witness something. He did something.
And the guilt is written all over him, in paint, in panic, in every trembling breath he tries and fails to steady. And his story is just not adding up. Somethings not adding up and he’s making it easier to catch him.