The article dropped on a Monday morning.
It hit the art world like a thrown match.
Amelia read it in silence, seated on the floor of the studio with her knees pulled to her chest, Daniel beside her. The headline alone was enough to make her stomach twist:
"Naked Ambition: The Muse, the Painter, and the Collapse of Julian Shaw's Empire."
Julian's fingerprints were all over it—twisted truths, exaggerated timelines, quotes taken out of context. He painted her as naïve, manipulated by a model with a troubled past. Daniel was the seducer. The interloper. The catalyst for her "creative decline."
But the worst part wasn't what they printed.
It was what they left out.
The intimacy. The healing. The truth of what they had created.
Daniel sat unmoving, his jaw tight. "They didn't even mention your work. Not once. Just your body. And mine."
Amelia let the paper slip from her fingers. "That was the point."
"Is it true what they said?" His voice was quiet now. "That this will hurt your next show?"
She looked up at him. Her expression wasn't broken—but sharpened. "Only if I let it."
He met her gaze. "What do you want to do?"
Her answer came without hesitation.
"Paint."
---
That night, she worked like a woman possessed.
She pulled out every canvas she'd put away. Every unfinished study of Daniel, every distorted sketch, every moment she'd tried to hide from the world. And then she started something new.
A series she hadn't planned. Unfiltered. Fierce.
Reclamation.
Daniel watched her from the corner, shirtless, jeans streaked with paint, as if he'd become a part of her palette. But this time, he didn't pose. He simply existed. And she painted not what the world saw, but what only she had ever dared to look at.
Rawness.
Wounds.
Beauty without explanation.
"You're not afraid anymore," he said softly.
Amelia didn't stop moving. "I was never afraid of them."
"Then what?"
She glanced at him, her eyes wet but burning. "Of losing myself in someone else's version of me."
He crossed the room, cupped her cheeks with paint-smeared hands. "You are the version that matters."
And as the night deepened, and the firelight from the small studio hearth danced across the walls, they held each other not as scandal, not as muse and artist, not as wounded bodies—
—but as two people who had refused to let the world unmake them.