As I make my preparations for Mara’s arrival, I go back and forth a hundred times on how I should kill her.
I’ve never been indecisive before.
I’ve always known exactly what I should do, as if it already happened.
She clouds my mind. She darkens my ability to see.
If I remove her from my life, I’ll go back to the way I was before. I’m sure of that.
The problem is . . . I don’t know if I want to go back.
Mara warps who I am. But in the moment, when I’m with her . . . I like it. I see things I never saw before. I feel things. Hell, I even taste things differently.
She’s electric. I touch her, and the current runs through me. She lights me up, turns me on, fills me with energy.
The cost is the loss of control.
Control has always been my highest priority. The thing that made me unique. The source of all my power.
I can’t give that up. I can’t become like everyone else.
In the end, it’s Mara who made the choice: I invited her to my home. She asked to come to the studio instead.
She wants the artist, not the man.
My art is death. It always has been.
I’ll make it a beautiful death. A pleasurable one. She deserves that at least.
The minutes tick by, seven o’clock drawing closer.
She won’t be late this time, I already know that. Her desire to see my studio is too great. It’s what she’s wanted most all along—just like Danvers.
I spent all day on the preparations. Planning is the foreplay.
At precisely seven o’clock, Mara arrives at the studio. I already heard the motion notification and walked toward the door to greet her. I open it before she’s pulled her finger back from the bell.
She turns, startled, her hair and her dress swirling around her. The dress is loose and diaphanous, black as a shroud. The peasant sleeves and square neckline give her a witchy look, especially when combined with her wild hair and the spatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
Fear battles with eagerness, adding a sharp edge to her scent. She licks her lips. They’re red and slightly chapped. I can almost taste their texture, like the rim of a cocktail glass—salty-sweet and granular.
“Are you going to let me in?” she says, tilting her head and looking up at me so her eyes are more slanted than ever above that upturned nose.
Each angle of her face reveals a mood. There’s always something new to be seen. I never finished reading her, and I suppose I never will.
I step aside. Her hair caresses my forearm as she passes. It slides across the back of my hand like a whisper, like a kiss.
The original old-fashioned lamps illuminate the studio, throwing pools of golden light down from the walls. Mara steps in and out of these pools, sometimes shadowed, sometimes glowing. She twirls slowly so her skirt bells out once more, revealing the long, slim stems of her legs. Her mouth opens in awe.
“All this space is yours?” she says.
“No one alive has seen it. Except me and you.”
“Secrets are lonely.”
“Only people who want company are lonely.”
“Only people who are scared of other people want to be alone,” Mara teases me, her quick smile displaying her pearly teeth.
I draw closer to her, watching her eyes widen, watching how she has to force herself to stand still as I approach. The impulse to flee is always present. Mara’s instincts are good . . . but she never listens to them.
“Which of us is scared right now?” I growl.
She stands her ground, looking up at me.
“Both of us, I think,” she murmurs.
My stomach clenches.
“And yet we’re both here,” she says. “Are you going to show me what you’re working on?”
“I haven’t made anything since Fragile Ego,” I admit. “But I plan to start something new tonight.”
A shiver runs across her shoulders — this time from pure excitement.
“You’re going to let me watch you work?” she asks.
“You’re going to help me. We’re going to do it together.”
She can hardly breathe.
“Right now?”
“Soon. I want to show you something first.”
I take her to the adjacent room, where I keep the half-dozen sculptures I never completed. The ones I could never quite make right.
I think of them as aborted fetuses. Unable to grow as they should. Abandoned by their creator because they died in the womb.
They’re ugly to me, and yet I can’t let them go because I know what they should have become.
Mara walks among them, slowly, examining each one. It pains me for her to see them, but I have to know if she sees them as I do—ruined and unfixable.
She’s silent, looking at each piece from every angle, taking her time. Her brows knit together in a frown, and she chews on the edge of her swollen lower lip.
Mara’s always biting at herself. It makes me want to bite her, too.
“These are the ones you couldn’t finish,” she says at last.
“That’s right.”
She doesn’t ask why. She can sense the imperfections of each. To a random person, they might look just as good as the pieces I’ve proudly displayed. But to the discerning eye, they’re as dead as a fossil. Worse, because they never actually lived.
She pauses by the last sculpture. This was my most expensive failure—I’d been working on a chunk of meteorite dug up in Tanzania. The thing weighed two tons when I started. I had to design a custom plinth to hold it.
“This one could be saved,” Mara says.
I shake my head. “I tried, trust me. The material alone cost me a fucking fortune.”
She runs her hand lightly down its spine, making me shiver, as if she were stroking my own skin.
“You were making a figure,” she says.
God, she’s perceptive.
“Yes. I considered moving away from abstract. But I’m no Rodin, clearly.”
“You could be,” Mara says, looking at me, her hand still resting on the meteorite. “You could be whatever you wanted to be. That’s not true for everyone. But I think it is for you.”
My jaw tightens, resentment swirling inside me.
“You have too much faith in people.”
I leave her, striding back out to the main room. Where my table waits, and all my tools.
Trusting as a lamb, Mara follows after me.
She sees the table under its surgical spotlight. She sees the tools laid out next to it: the chisels, mallets, hammers, knives. And she sees the bare space where the raw material ought to reside.
I turn to face her, wondering how long it will take her to understand.
Mara crosses the space slowly, not looking at the table. Only looking at me.
“I really don’t,” she says. “I don’t have any faith. I learned early that some people have no kindness inside of them. No mercy. They’re broken and twisted and cruel, and they can’t feel anything but malice. My mother is like that. She’s the scorpion that would sting you, even if you were carrying her on your back. Even if it meant you would both die. She just can’t help herself.”
I’m standing right by the tools. My fingers inches from the knife.
“I’m good at seeing, Cole. I saw who she was at an early age. And I see who you are, too.”
Mara steps directly into the brilliant beam of light. Every detail of her person is illuminated: every freckle, every glint of silver and thread of black in those wide eyes.
“I know it was Alastor Shaw that took me. He dumped me in the woods for you to find.”
My hand freezes above the blade.
How does she know that?
“He wanted you to kill me, but you didn’t. You didn’t kill me that night or any of the nights that followed. And it’s not because you haven’t killed before. It’s because you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to hurt me.”
My fingers twitch, the tips brushing the handle of the knife.
“You’ve been watching over me. Protecting me. Helping me. You might have told yourself it was for your own enjoyment, for your own fucked up reasons. But you care about me, Cole, I know you do. I’ve seen it. Maybe you don’t want to care. Maybe you’d like to kill me right now to stop it. But I don’t believe you will. Too much has happened between us. You’ve changed too much.”
Slowly, she slides the sleeves of her dress down her arms. Baring her delicate shoulders and her small, round breasts. She lets the dress drop all the way to her feet and steps out of it. She’s naked underneath, her body glistening under the light, the silver rings glinting in her nipples.
The wild garden runs down her right side, ending at the point of her hip. She wears it proudly, my mark on her skin.
And I wear hers: the white snake and the black. I thought the snakes were her and I, good and evil, locked in battle. Now I wonder if she meant them both to be me…
She takes another step toward me. Naked and unafraid.
I never get used to the sight of her body. The tightness of it, the wild energy that courses through it. The moment I touch her, that energy will pulse into me. Sliding my cock inside her would be like strapping into an electric chair.
Her eyes locked on mine, she says, “You won’t hurt me.”
Now it’s me who licks my lips.
Me whose voice comes out in harsh rasp as I say, “Are you willing to bet your life on that?”
Mara climbs up on the table, laying down beneath the light. She gazes upward, her tender body exposed and vulnerable.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she says.
The closer I get to her, the more I can smell her scent rising off that bare skin. It makes my heart race. My mouth water. Under the stark light, I see the veins running beneath her skin. All that warm, hot blood pumping fast with every beat of her heart.
I stoop and lift the restraints attached to the table legs.
Perhaps there is some mercy in me, because I hold up the manacle, giving her one last chance.
“Are you sure?”
She looks into my eyes, believing that she sees something there.
Then she holds out her wrist to me.
“I want you,” she says. “And you want me.”
I close the manacle around her wrist, hearing it lock in place.
“Now I have you,” I say.
