Page 182 of Stone: The Precursor

He kisses my face and picks me up, walking down the hall to his big bed with the chains on the headboard. “Six months.”

“Six months?”

“Yes. Six months from today we will marry. I don’t care where. Just tell me when to be there.”

I think about it and realize I want something small. A huge wedding with all the fanfare sounds like a nightmare. “Just us and friends in the backyard. So your sister and niece can be there.”

He draws my face forward, kissing me slowly, lovingly. “What the fuck am I going to do with you?”

“I have some ideas?”

“Hmm. Tell me.”

“I was thinking about a long, hot shower. I’m feeling very dirty after what happened on the side of the road.”

“How dirty?”

“It might take a while for me to get clean. I think you might have to do a full body inspection.”

Epilogue

Waking up, I touch the cold sheets next to me and smile.

She’s painting again.

I slip out of bed, pulling up my discarded jeans on the floor, and walk downstairs to where I know she is. I follow her scent, like the siren she is, my blood already pumping to see what she’s painted. Her work has always amazed me, but lately it’s taken on an even darker edge. The result of her kidnapping that still haunts me, but she’s also leaned into her own morbid curiosity. Images of flayed skin, broken bones, rotted entrails, and deathly specters are now a part of her paintings. She even immortalized my kills on canvas. My favorite is the moment she painted me shirtless, covered in his blood, staring at the view of my knife in hand.

Tiptoeing down stairs, I find her sitting in the middle of the living room, painting at her easel. The painting she did earlier leans against the wall. A painting of an angel, beautifully done, with soft paint strokes. Ivory as an angel. It’s for my mother. She’s lost all memories of my sister, her granddaughter. It’s a matter of time before I’m lost to her, too.

She likes to paint, looking at my sister’s and nieces’ graves. She brings them flowers every week. Just like she visits my mother every week. It was Camryn who suggested I stop reading the bible to my mother and remove Ivory’s stuffed toy. It now has a place of honor on the fireplace mantle.

On the nights we stay in the apartment, she paints in the living room, and I watch her from the couch, biding my time until I can fuck her. Tonight is no different. I sit and watch slow strokes, her concentration.

But there’s a new painting on the easel. Another in a new series. Siren Rising. Mostly abstract images of her and pain. Some are sexy and sensual, others are dark and horrifying. Made with all types of media. Including my blood, her blood, my semen, and yes, even the burned ashes of El Jefe. No one knows but us. The secret between.

She looks beautiful in the luminescent glow, but I also love it when she sits there early in the mornings, the soft buttery light coating her smooth skin.

No one knows but us. The secret between.

Walk into my office. The dark room is filled with my trophies on the wall. Above my desk is my prized possession: the stitched skin of my enemy with her face imprinted in the tissue. Grotesquely beautiful. Revenge at its finest. He wanted to mark her, destroy her, but in the end, it’s he who bears the mark of my queen, reduced to nothing more than a piece of dried skin.

Sauntering toward her, I lean down and kiss the top of her head, looking at her painting.

“What are you still doing up?”

She turns and looks up at me, smiling. “I got an urge to paint. Your show was a triumph and as your girlfriend, I–”

“Fiancé,” I correct her.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot for a second.” She giggles, holding up her hand so that the black opal’s iridescent colors flash in the moonlight.

“I’ll have to keep reminding you.”

She stretches, moving her neck, and I step behind her, holding her hips against my erection.

“How are you going to remind me?”

Massaging her neck, I kiss behind her ear. “By making you scream my name.”