The waitress offered to sketch my portrait for a plate of food, but when I looked down, she had drawn my deepest, darkest crime in microscopic words.

The studio was freezing.

A single halogen lamp illuminated a tiny room filled with massive, towering canvases. The air smelled of oil paint, linseed oil, and old paper. In the corner sat a narrow twin mattress covered in three heavy wool blankets. Beside it, a small electric space heater hummed weakly, its orange coils doing little to fight the damp chill.

Grant stepped into the room, his eyes scanning the walls.

What he saw took his breath away.

The canvases weren't abstract shapes or pretty landscapes. They were epic, monumental portraits of working-class men and women. A machinist with oil-stained hands. A woman in a diner uniform staring out a rain-slicked window. An elderly farmer sitting on the porch of an abandoned house.

And in the center of the room, sitting on a heavy wooden easel, was a five-foot-tall oil painting in progress.

Grant walked toward it as if drawn by a magnet.

It was a painting of Marlowe House—the luxurious, glittering dining room twelve stories above Manhattan. But in Ellie’s painting, the floor-to-ceiling windows weren't showing the glittering city skyline.

They were showing a stormy, dark sea filled with struggling, drowning faces. And sitting in the center of the warm, golden booth, drinking red wine while the sea raged outside, was Grant Voss.

Except the Grant Voss in the oil painting wasn't smiling.

He was reaching out toward the glass, his fingers pressed against the pane, trying desperately to break it from the inside.

"It's called The Feast," Ellie said quietly, standing by the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. "I’ve been working on it for a year."

Grant couldn't take his eyes off the canvas. The technical skill was extraordinary—the light play was worthy of a Dutch master—but the emotional weight was staggering.

"This is incredible," Grant whispered. "Ellie... this is a masterpiece."

"It's an unfinished memory," she corrected. "I couldn't finish the face. I couldn't figure out if the man in the booth was trapped, or if he was the one who built the cage."

Grant turned to look at her. "He built the cage. But he doesn't have the key anymore."

Ellie walked over to a small wooden stool and sat down, picking up a palette knife. "Why are you really here, Grant? A man like you doesn't come to Crown Heights at seven in the morning because he feels guilty about a short rib."

Grant took off his six-thousand-dollar cashmere coat and draped it carefully over a wooden folding chair. He didn't care about the paint dust or the concrete grime.

"Because yesterday afternoon, my board of directors approved a hostile takeover of Miller Precision Logistics," Grant said, his voice hard. "It’s the largest deal of my career. A two-billion-dollar liquidation. If it goes through, four manufacturing plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania will be closed. Nine thousand workers will lose their pensions."

Ellie looked up, her gray-green eyes flashing. "And you’re going to do it."

"No," Grant said. "I was going to do it. Until I sat in your booth last night."

He walked over to her easel, looking at the painted reflection of himself.

"Caleb Morris and my junior partners have been working with a rogue faction of the Miller board to push the deal through," Grant explained. "They’re going to gut the company, take a eighty-million-dollar payout, and leave the workers with nothing. Just like we did to your father's plant four years ago."

Ellie leaned forward, her jaw tightening. "Can you stop it?"

"I own thirty-four percent of Voss Capital," Grant said. "I need fifty-one percent to veto the board's vote on Friday. But to get it, I need to expose the illegal offshore accounts Caleb and his associates have been using to bribe the Miller union representatives."

He looked directly into Ellie’s eyes.

"I need someone who knows how to see what people are hiding. I need someone who can look at a stack of forged financial ledgers and find the handwriting of the man who wrote them."

Ellie stared at him, a faint, disbelieving laugh escaping her lips. "You want a starving artist to help you win a Wall Street proxy war?"

"I don't want an artist," Grant said softly. "I want Arthur Hart’s daughter. I want to give you the weapon to stop the man who destroyed your father."

Ellie looked down at the palette knife in her hand, her fingers tightening around the wooden handle until her knuckles turned white.

"If we fail?" she asked.

Grant’s smile was grim, colder than the morning air in the basement.

"If we fail, Caleb takes my company, I go to federal prison for corporate negligence, and you never have to look at my face again."

Ellie stood up slowly. She walked over to the corner of the room, picked up her piece of charcoal, and stepped up to the massive oil painting on the easel.