There Are No Saints (Sinners Duet #1)(18)

She’s an interesting conundrum. Vulnerable yet fierce. Damaged yet stubborn.

Mara does not make personal posts—no long, rambling dissertations on her inner feelings under a mirror selfie, and no vague captions intended to elicit a flood of comments begging for more details.

She made no mention of her ordeal in the woods.

Her only recent posts are requests for studio space.

This is a constant problem in San Francisco for those at the mercy of fickle landlords. I own my own private studio close to my house, and also a block of studios on Clay Street.

I’m considering offering one to Mara Eldritch. I want to see her work in person. And it would make watching her much more convenient.

I’ve already decided that Mara and I will inevitably cross paths—the art world is too small to avoid it.

I intend to choose the time and location of that meeting. I’ll control all the elements, arranging the players like pieces on a chessboard.

It’s unlike me to fixate on a woman like this. I find most people horrifically boring. I’ve never met anyone as intelligent as me, or as talented. Other people are weak and emotional—slaves to their impulses. Constantly making promises they can’t keep, even to themselves.

Only I seem to have the power to control my own fate.

Whatever I want to happen, happens. I make it so by my own cunning, my own determination.

Everyone else is a victim of chance and circumstance. To arbitrary rules set up by people who died a hundred years ago. To their own pathetic ineptitude.

I do what I want. I get what I want. Always. Every time.

If there’s a god of this world, it’s me.

But even Zeus found mortals interesting from time to time.

I desire to see Mara again, to speak to her. I want to manipulate her and see how she reacts.

And if I want something . . . that means it’s good.





I break into her room later that afternoon.

She’s walking a half-dozen dogs in Golden Gate Park, something that usually takes her several hours with the pick-up and drop-off process.

It’s almost impossible to find a point in the day where none of her roommates are home, so I don’t bother waiting. The house is so crowded, with so many people coming and going, I doubt that any of them will notice a few extra creaks from a room that ought to be empty.

It helps that Mara’s room is on the topmost floor. It’s easy to scale the trellis of the neighboring house, drop down onto her deck, and force open the flimsy lock on the glass door.

The attic room is certainly not to code. The ceiling is so low that I can’t stand upright, even in the center of the peaked space. Mara’s bed is a futon mattress on the floor, her clothes folded in plastic milk crates because she has no closet or dresser.

This is the sort of cramped, chaotic space that usually disgusts me. The dusty air and stacks of battered secondhand books next to the bed—no bookshelf to hold them—reek of poverty.

Curiosity staves off my repulsion. I’m drawn to the hundreds of sketches taped all over the sloped walls.

Most of the drawings are figure studies. She has a good sense of proportion, and she’s skilled at indicating the direction of the light. Perhaps because most of the subjects are her friends, she’s caught a strong sense of personality in their positions, in the expression of their faces. The tall black girl, Joanna, looks awkward but pleased at being drawn. The boy with frizzy curls seems to be holding back a laugh.

With no place to sit, I sink down on Mara’s pathetic mattress. The bed is unmade, her blanket in a crumpled pile.

I flip through several of her books. Naked Lunch, The Virgin Suicides, Life After Life, Troubled Blood, Black Swan Green, Lolita, Cold Spring Harbor, Winter’s Bone, The Cement Garden . . .

Butterflied next to the bed is Dracula. I pick it up, seeing that she’s drawn all over the pages, marking passages and writing notes.

She’s underlined:



Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer—both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams . . .”



I smile to myself.

Poor little Mara is not impervious to nightmares, whatever she may pretend during the daylight hours.

I pick up the next novel on the stack, Prometheus Illbound, and let it fall open to a dog-eared page. Here she’s marked:



I do not love men: I love what devours them.



That actually makes me laugh. I haven’t laughed in some time.

I set the books down.

I can smell Mara’s perfume on her sheets, stronger than when I followed her.

I lay down in her bed, my head on her pillow. I turn my face so my nose is pressed against her crumpled sheets and I inhale.

Her scent is layered and complex. Warm notes of vanilla, caramel. A botanical scent—mandarin, or maybe black currant. Then something exotic, spiced—perhaps a jasmine soap. Under that, the light scent of her sweat, which arouses me far more than any of the others. My cock swells until it’s no longer comfortable within my trousers.

I enjoy the trespass of laying in her bed. Knowing that she may catch a hint of my cologne lingering there tonight. It may confuse or frighten her. Or arouse her, if my chemical composition calls to her as hers does to me.

The idea of her heart beating fast, of her startling awake, searching her room for evidence that someone else was here, amuses me.