Her skin was milk and honey, smooth as freshly fallen snow. She blinked, looked up at me.

“Still not turned on?” I asked.

“No.” She enunciated the word venomously, waiting to see what I’d do next.

I laughed. She did, too. The crazy, humorless laugh of two people who understand each other perfectly, yet are stuck in a world that makes no sense to them. I never thought I’d have this with a girl. Or a guy. Or any fucking human, for that matter. Not even my parents fully understood me.

I pushed her shoulders, and she slid over the bench, lying down.

I put the chisel to her jeans and used it to pop the three buttons free, tugging the denim down her thighs with my free hand. Still looking her dead in the eye, I clipped her panties from each side, letting them fall beneath her, and put the pointy end of the chisel to her pussy, waiting for her to stop me.

“Not horny for this blade, baby?”

“Not even a bit.” Her eyes leveled with mine, daring me.

Show me more of your crazy. My veins hummed with exhilaration. It’s turning me the fuck on.

I was so hard I didn’t even have time to be worried about what I was about to do to her. With her.

I looked down and again noticed her tattoo.

Ars longa, vita brevis. I could finally read it, and I knew exactly what it meant, why she’d put it there. Something inspired me to kiss it. I did. She shuddered.

“There will be other pleasures worth chasing, and they’ll have nothing to do with art,” I whispered into her skin, unable to pull away from it.

“Show me,” she rasped.

I slid the chisel into her pussy, stopping a quarter of the way in. I wasn’t going to hurt her, not really, no matter how much she craved it. I found her hot and wet and ready. Drenched. Her cunt produced wet sounds that drove me mad and made my dick so hard I got dizzy from lack of blood to my other organs. The slightest stroke of her hand and I was going to jizz like a broken sprinkler system in a country club. This wasn’t going to be a twenty-minute session of virtuous lovemaking. I’d be lucky not to come in my goddamn jeans.

Len braced herself on her forearms and watched my hand sliding in and out of her with the chisel, keeping the penetration shallow. She closed her eyes, her head falling back, and shivered, her entire body blossoming in goosebumps.

I wrapped my injured arm around her neck, bringing her closer, kissing her slow and hot and deep, getting her all sex-crazed. Her mouth slid across my wrist, like I knew it would, and her eyes rolled back in their sockets the minute her mouth touched my blood.

“God…” Her voice cracked like an egg, spilling with lust.

“God, what?”

“God…have sex with me.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do,” I lamented. “Say the magic word.”

“Please?”

“Fuck. Fuck me.”

I was buying time so I wouldn’t come prematurely before my briefs were shoved down to my ankles. She closed her eyes, drawing a shaky breath. I slid the chisel half an inch deeper into her pussy. She was so wet I doubted it was enough for her. She couldn’t squeeze around it, choke it with her walls. No. My cock was the only thing that could do the trick, and we both knew it.

“Please fuck me.” The words fell from her mouth, which tasted salty and warm, like my blood. I kissed her again.

“Why?” I asked, my lips moving down her neck, sucking. “You’re not turned on. Seems pretty pointless.”

“Vaughn,” she moaned.

She was so close to coming, and suddenly, I realized I wanted her to. I wanted her to walk out of here satisfied.

Not because of my sculpting tools. But because of my cock.

I pulled away, dragging the chisel out of her pussy. My mouth disconnected from her neck. I got up and left her to fall against the bench with a thud, staring at me, sober-eyed, mouth agape.

“You say you don’t like blood, but I tasted your lips, and you’re a little demon. It’s on your breath. I think you’re far from normal. I think you’re every shade of screwed-up in the coloring book, just like me, and I knew—saw it—when I gave you that brownie all those years ago. But the biggest lie you tell yourself is that you’re not mine. Get a clue, Astalis.” I threw the chisel at her feet, turned around, and walked out of the cellar, leaving her there alone.

I wasn’t worried for one second that she was going to peek at my work, see my statue.

She was a liar, yes, but she was my liar.

I didn’t need a trust fall. I’d dive headfirst and know she would catch me.

Len galloped toward me, out into the hallway. She spun me by the shoulder and frowned. “You have sex with me now, Vaughn Spencer, or I swear to God, I will leave this place tomorrow morning and never see you again.”