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CHAPTER SEVEN

JAXON

I resolve to ignore her for the rest of the day.

She doesn’t make it easy. She keeps thumping around her room, dragging her chain across the floor, just generally making noise. At one point, I hear a loud, splattery crash, like she’s showing me what she thinks of my oatmeal.

Fine. If she won’t eat in her room, then she’ll eat downstairs, with me. After all, I’m the one with the upper hand here. She’s in my house, wearing the chain that I welded around the bed three years ago. If it weren’t for my gods, she would be in my studio now, a beautiful art piece preserved by frost and ice until I find the sculpture hidden in her flesh.

I’m the one with the upper hand, and yet I feel like she controls me every time she fixes me with those brown eyes.

So I go to my studio to try to find some solace in my work. Not that I have much to work with; I haven’t brought anyone back to my studio in quite some time. At least two months. There are a few limbs in the deep freeze, the skin marred useless by freezer burn; I should be able to salvage the bones, though. A few jars of old blood that I could stretch with paint. Assorted ephemera—locks of hair, loose teeth, finger bones. I dump them out on my work table and rattle through them, looking for inspiration. Nothing.

My gods are silent, too, having retreated into the Abyss without any word of advice, as useless as Ambrose. I sweep the ephemera back into their box and pull down one of the jars of blood. Charlotte told me she was a painter. Perhaps I can paint her. I can’t kill her, but I can still capture her essence in that way.

It would be better if I had her blood, though.

That idea perks me up, and perks up my Guardian, too, given its love of fresh hot blood. Only a little , it whispers to me. Don’t kill her .

I know, I know.

But how the hell am I going to get her blood? If I get too close to her, she’ll fight me; I can sense that intention radiating off her. Now, I would win , of course, but I don’t want her fighting me when I’m trying to cut her with a knife. It’s not like she’s going to sit still while I bleed her out into a bowl.

A syringe? Do I even have a syringe? Probably not a clean one.

I give up that little fantasy for the time being and just use the old blood, pouring a few drops into my pallet and then mixing it around with gouache from some crusty old tubes I found shoved in the back of my paint drawer since Charlotte said she paints with gouache most of the time. It mixes better than I would have expected, the blood thickening up the gouache and giving it a kind of rusty undertone that I like. Dilutes pretty well in water, too.

I don’t plan anything, just start painting her from memory, using the four colors I was able to find: a sickly yellow, a dark blue, some ancient white, and your basic Kelly green. All of them are streaked with rust from the blood. I’m not crazy how the colors look together, even when I try to blend them, but I like the way her eyes start to come out from the thick, smeary lines I slap on the watercolor paper I’m using. It’s an ugly mess except for her eyes. They peer out at me, pinning me in place even as I’m trapping her in the gouache and blood.

I lose track of time. It’s not until the light in the window starts to change that I realize how late it is. How hungry I am, too—I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. And I was going to bring Charlotte down for dinner.

I put the paint away and leave everything else and go back into the house, which feels warm after being out in my chilly studio. I keep that cold for obvious reasons. Charlotte’s quiet. No thumping, no screaming. I can’t help myself; I go upstairs to check on her before dinner.

She’s stretched out on the bed, still wearing her dress from yesterday. I think she’s asleep, but she lifts her head when I open the door and looks up at me the same way she looked out at me from the painting.

“My chamber pot’s full,” she says balefully.

I knew that already; I’ve got a Hunter’s sense of smell. I wasn’t going to say anything, though. “I’ll change it out while you’re downstairs for dinner.”

She pushes up on her arms, fear flickering across her face. “Dinner?”

“You’ll need to change.” I really want to see her in that yellow sundress. “Be ready in an hour.”

“Or what?”

Her eyes gleam, challenging me. This would be so much easier if I could kill her, but even thinking about it sends jolts of electricity running through my limbs. My gods storm around.

“I’ll tie you down and do it myself.”

The idea excites me. Makes my skin prickle. Charlotte just glares at me.

“An hour,” I tell her.

Then I leave, my heart thumping.

Since it’s cold out, I make crawfish étouffée, using the big bag of frozen crawfish I keep in my food freezer. I’m not like Ambrose. Animal meat only, thank you very much.

Once the étouffée is done, simmering quietly on the stove, I set everything up in the formal dining room, using my grandmother’s fancy porcelain china from the 1920s, two decades after she and my grandfather built this house. I light some candles. Dim the chandelier that hangs up above the table. Lay out cloth napkins. Open a bottle of expensive red wine and set it next to my place setting so it can breathe.

Then I go to my room and grab my carving knife from its place on my bedside table. My Guardian screeches a little. “I’m not going to kill her,” I mutter. “But she might need some convincing.”

Charlotte was quiet the whole time I was cooking. I don’t know if she’s resigned or she’s worn out or if she’s planning something. Maybe all three.

When I go to her room, I stand outside the closed door and listen for a few minutes. Listen, and try to calm down my racing heart. I hate how nervous I am about this. About entertaining a living girl.

She shuffles around inside, the chain clanking softly.

I push the door open.

Charlotte stops when I do, looking up at me, her expression unreadable. What stuns me, though, is that she actually did change. The yellow dress looks like she’s wrapped in sunlight, and it has these off-the-shoulder sleeves that show off the top part of her chest, the bodice tight enough to squeeze her breasts upward. She stares at me, red hair falling around her bare shoulders, her smeared eye makeup suddenly more noticeable than it was earlier.

“Happy?” She stalks over to the chair and pulls up the change of underwear I brought her. “I couldn’t put these on, by the way.” She shakes her chained leg to illustrate her point.

I swallow. Clutch my knife a little tighter, for strength. Her eyes flick down to it, noticing it for the first time. Fear wafts off her, the usual spicy scent that, on her, has a dark, bloody undercurrent that drives me wild.

“You can change your underwear after I unchain you,” I tell her. “But wait here.”

She opens her mouth like she wants to protest but I slam the door shut, breathing hard. She isn’t like a typical victim. I knew that, of course—I knew that the second I saw her walk into that diner, glittering like a victim but marked with clear instructions from my gods not to destroy her. She has this defiance about her that would be infuriating in an ordinary victim, the sort of thing that would earn them a slower-than-usual death. But that defiance only adds to her allure. Even when she obeys me—putting on the yellow dress, say—it feels like defiance.

She planning something. And that just sparks my blood even more.

I dart back into my room to grab two things: her makeup bag from her suitcase and the cigarette case of weed, which I slip into my back pocket. Then it’s back to her room, where she’s still standing beside the bed, arms crossed over her chest, glaring at me.

“Redo your makeup.” I toss the bag on the bed.

“Why?” She doesn’t take her eyes off me.

“You’re going to dinner.” I answer her calmly, although I squeeze the knife, prepared to threaten her with it if she gets too defiant. I’m hoping she does. “You need to look nice.”

Her mascara-smeared eyes narrow. “I need to look nice for you, you mean.”

I shrug. She rolls her eyes but does sit on the bed and rummages around in her bag. Her fear perfumes the air. I bet she figures getting out of the room will be her chance to escape. But she thinks I’m a human man, some loathsome serial killer idiot, and not a being designed to do exactly what I’m doing to her.

I watch her clean the old makeup off her face with baby wipes and then apply it fresh. She doesn’t put on as much as she was wearing yesterday, but that’s fine. Honestly, it would be fine if she didn’t wear any. I just didn’t like that the smeared makeup reminds me that she’s been crying.

“Happy?” she says when she finishes. She looks up at me, her eyes dark and smokey, her lips bare.

I gesture for her to stand up.

She does, sighing, putting the makeup bag aside. The chain snakes from her ankle to the bed.

“I’m going to take that off,” I tell her. “And you can change your underwear.” I hold up the knife, and her eyes settle on it with a fearful yet avaricious gleam. She thinks she can use a weapon against me.

“Then what?”

“Then you’ll come downstairs.”

Her eyes glitter. She wants to know if I’m going to chain her up. She’s worked through the different possibilities, I think. What to do if I handcuff her. What to do if I lead her downstairs on a leash. What to do if I threaten her with a knife.

I smile a little. She has no idea what I am and what I can do. Even if I can’t kill her.

I pick up the clean panties, relishing their silky fabric. Charlotte watches me, and, to her credit, keeps her expression blank. Although when I hand them to her, she snatches them away, curling them up in her fist.

I crouch down at her feet, my muscles tense because hers are tense. I can smell her adrenaline.

I wear the key to her lock around my neck, along with the key to the room, and I can feel her staring at me as I set down the knife on the ground and pull the keys out from under my shirt. She says nothing as I slide the key into the cuff, but I sense the shift in her heart rate.

As soon as the cuff springs free, Charlotte lunges sideways—going for the knife, no doubt. But I expect it, and I move faster than I’ve moved for her yet, grabbing her by the waist and throwing her onto the bed so quickly it’s clear she doesn’t understand what happened. Because her fear shifts. Sharpens. And it’s clear on her face, now, too.

“How—” She stops herself.

“Don’t do things like that,” I say. “Just because I can’t kill you doesn’t mean I can’t hurt you.”

My Guardian and the Unnamed both hiss, but Charlotte doesn’t need to know that.

“Let me go,” she whispers. I’m still pinning her down by the waist, her knees spread on either side of my hips. It’s what you might call a compromising position. My cock certainly notices.

“You need to change your underwear,” I tell her.

She glares at me. “Why do you care?”

“Why do you not?” The truth is I want the dirty pair for my own use, but I don’t want to see her look of disgust when I tell her that. “If you’re good at dinner, I’ll even let you have a bath.”

We both know she’s not going to be good at dinner.

“Fuck you,” she says.

There it is. That delicious defiance. It floods me with a sudden surge of confidence.

“Give me the underwear.” I feel suddenly very powerful, with her strong, thick body pinned by my strong, thick hands. Her eyes flash angrily, and she squeezes the underwear even tighter.

“Give me the underwear,” I tell her again, hardly believing the words as they come out of my mouth. “So I can change them myself.”