There Are No Saints (Sinners Duet #1)(65)

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.

Black Magic Woman — VCTRYS

Spotify → geni.us/no-saints-spotify

Apple Music → geni.us/no-saints-apple





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.