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.”