Some paintings are not paintings. They are prisons.

Milan, 1497. Leonardo da Vinci has painted Judas seventeen times.

Seventeen times he has scraped the traitor's face from The Last Supper. Seventeen times it has come back wrong.

The plaster will not hold it. The pigment changes overnight. And something on the other side of the wall has learned to speak in Leonardo's own voice.

Then a letter arrives from his dead grandfather.

Antonio da Vinci has been buried a month. The letter calls Leonardo home to the box that went into the grave with him.

Inside: seven pots of pigment that should not exist, a half-finished portrait wearing the wrong smile, and a journal containing seven names.

Seven names. Seven cities. Seven deaths.

Antonio was the eighth keeper.

Leonardo is the ninth.

The colours are ground from things dug out of unconsecrated earth. They hold more than light and shadow. They hold a presence. They can build a prison no soul can leave.

And they work.

That is the horror of them.

Because every colour demands payment, and the payment is never money. A memory. A face. A colour a boy will never see again. Something you love so completely that you will not know it is gone until you reach for it and find a warm and empty place where it used to be.

And whatever is taken leaves a room behind.

Something has already begun to move in.

The Painted Souls begins here.

Grandfather's Pigments is the Renaissance prequel to The Mona Lisa Cage: a supernatural thriller of forbidden art, buried family secrets, and the price of painting something that should never have been painted.

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

Free, always.

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