Is Cole my mentor or a killer? Is he protecting me, or hunting me?
There’s only one way to learn the truth.
Cole slips his hand down the front of my shorts. He finds my pussy already slippery and throbbing. Desperate for his touch.
I let out a long moan as he pushes his fingers inside me.
He shoves me against the dryer, grinding my hips against the door. I can feel his cock pressed between my ass cheeks. The warmth and the rumbling vibration surge through me, over and over, with every turn of the clothes. It only takes three thrusts with his fingers, three pulses of his hips against my ass, before I start to cum.
I’m moaning and shaking, grinding against the dryer. Cole holds me in place with his wet, steaming body. Pressing me against the vibration, sending each new wave surging through me.
“Seven o’clock tomorrow night,” he growls in my ear. “No fucking around this time. If you’re one minute late . . . I’m coming to find you.”
I can hardly hear him over the dryer. Over the hot, liquid pleasure pounding in my ears.
All in a moment, he’s gone. The buzzer sounds, the dryer stops, and I’m standing there, legs shaking, realizing that I’m definitely fucking crazy.
29
Cole
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.
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.