Grandfather's Pigments

Milan, 1497. Leonardo da Vinci cannot finish The Last Supper. The plaster will not keep the traitor's face. The pigment dries wrong overnight. And something on the far side of that wall has learned to speak in his own voice.

Then a letter arrives from Vinci, in his grandfather's hand, written a month after the old man was buried.

It calls Leonardo home to a box that went into the ground with Antonio da Vinci: seven pots of pigment that should not exist, a half-finished portrait wearing the wrong smile, and a journal naming every keeper who came before him.

Seven names. Seven cities. Seven deaths.

Antonio was the eighth keeper. Leonardo is the ninth.

The colours work. That is the horror of them. Ground from things taken out of unconsecrated ground, they hold more than light and shadow. They hold a presence. They can build a prison a soul cannot leave.

But every pot has a price, and the price is never money. It is a memory. A face. A colour a boy will never see again. Something a man loves and will not miss until the moment he reaches for it and finds a warm and empty space where it used to be.

And whatever is taken leaves a room behind.

Something is already learning how to live in it.

Some colors were never meant to exist.

Now a full novel. Expanded from the original novella with five new movements and more than twenty thousand new words.

Free, always. Start the Painted Souls series here, then step into The Mona Lisa Cage.

Read it slow. Read it at night. Trust nothing in the corners.