She translated what she saw, the scruffy quality of the man, the air of danger. “Are you going to tell me why you are allowing this? Or am I supposed to guess?”

The man had always been painfully blunt with her. “I wanted to observe the change in you.”

“And measure it?” Claire asked, cocking a brow just to be bitchy. “Do you find me lacking?”

“I always do.”

She chuckled again, peeking up to meet his eye. “I take that as a compliment.”

The Beta stood a distance away, at attention, stiff yet twitchy... and glaring at her in that way he did. “You need to progress more. You need to accept what’s in front of you.”

The painting’s final touches were rendered, Claire squinting at her project, looking for flaws. “If I was to tell you how much I hate your enigmatic bullshit, would you believe me?”

“Thólos, Miss O’Donnell.” The man grunted. “You can’t save Thólos.”

“I don’t want to save Thólos.” Setting the brush aside, she gave him a long look. “I want Thólos to save itself.”

“And there is that clever brain I keep hearing about,” the man snorted, rolling his eyes.

“For my only friend down in this prison, you’re kind of an ass.”

“I am not your friend.”

“Yes, you are.” She turned the painting towards him and watched his eyes flick down momentarily to appraise it. “I doubt you intended to be, but you are.”

Jules always sounded so unamused, leveling that dead-eyed gaze at her. “You made me look different.”

At his words, Claire burst out laughing.

Pushing the painting towards him, she mused, “I wonder if all of you see yourselves in some distorted way. This is what you look like, Jules.”

Pinching the parchment between his fingers as if he found it distasteful, Jules lifted the painting and frowned at it. “I want to see your other work.”

“Even the paintings of Shepherd?”

“There are more than one?” It almost seemed as if he cocked a brow, but there was no movement on his face.

For some reason the question embarrassed her and color flamed in her cheeks. Claire didn’t answer. She reached for her stack of paintings and leafed through them, removing several and setting them aside before placing the bunch before the Beta.

Unsmiling, he set his wet portrait down and began working through her collection: her images of Thólos, the nightmares she’d seen all there for him to examine as he flipped through the pages. Some paintings she could see were meaningless, boring to him. Some he stared at a little longer. There was no comment made until he reached the picture of Corday making eggs in his kitchen. “You should not have painted his rival.”

“Corday is not Shepherd’s rival. Corday is my friend.”