She spent the morning in the east wing among the collection, and found herself cataloging the house instead of the paintings — a habit she couldn't break, the old professional instinct to map exits, blind spots, the places a man like Damon Voss might keep the things that mattered most. The paintings, when she made herself focus, were exactly what the paperwork claimed. Nothing hidden behind them. If he had something to protect, it wasn't hanging on these walls.

Around noon, he brought her a sandwich she hadn't asked for and stood close enough while she ate it that she was aware of very little else.

"You didn't strike me as a man who feeds his appraisers," she said.

"I don't usually have one stranded in my house for a week." His gaze moved over the landscape she'd been cataloging — stark, empty, indifferent. "What do you make of it?"

"Technically accomplished. Emotionally isolating."

"I chose the whole collection myself." Something flickered behind his eyes, there and gone. "I like paintings that don't ask anything of me. No people to disappoint. Just weather, indifferent to whoever's watching it."

"That sounds lonely."

"It was, before this week." He said it plainly, watching her reaction with an intensity that made her want to look away and refuse to, both at once. "I don't often let people close enough to notice. You'll have to forgive me if I haven't decided yet whether that was a mistake."

She should have laughed it off. Instead she found herself holding his gaze a beat too long, some reckless part of her enjoying being looked at like she mattered enough to be a

The power flickered that afternoon, once, twice, and held. By evening, it didn't.