A Touch of Dark (Painted Sin Book 1)

by Lana Sky

  I return to my bedroom, standing upright this time. The woman I spot in the full-length mirror near my bed looks like a perfect representation of confidence. Cool exterior. Watering, bloodshot eyes…

  Shit. I rub them on my sleeve and turn my attention to my extensive wardrobe. Oleander. I can’t get the pure color of it out of my head, though I only have one ensemble in the same lethal shade. A dress bought for some unremarkable occasion and promptly shoved to the back of my closet. I extract it out by the hanger and eye it warily. It’s a simple sheath dress with a plunging neckline. Far too daring.

  Out of morbid curiosity, I try it on, and I’m unsettled by the results. My hair spills across the scalloped top like blood, unseemly against such a blinding shade of white. Surround me with flowers and I could be one of Sampson’s paintings.

  Dress me in blue and I’d be the perfect doll for Simon.

  Seal my eyes shut with glue and I’d be Leslie.

  The thought forces me to remember my third present. I find it in the bathroom, lying on a bed of glass shards. I gingerly remove the ribbon and wrap it around my wrist: a glowing reminder. The rose, I tuck behind my ear.

  My reflection greets me from the destroyed mirror, but I don’t recognize the person I find. Someone stupid enough to visit one monster in her spare time before another comes calling.

  I grab my coat from the hall closet and find the business card inside the pocket. A minute-long call is all it takes to have my usual town car service send a driver around. Ten minutes later, I’m stepping out from the shelter of the Lariat and heading across town.

  Damien likes his privacy. His haunt is a tall building near the waterfront. Dark brick and sleek glass form an impressive structure that I assume is privately owned when I reach the entrance and find both glass doors locked. There’s no sign. Merely an intercom affixed on the outside wall. When I press the button marked call, a gruff voice comes from the speaker, laced with static.

  “What do you want?”

  That’s a damn good question.

  “Name?”

  I jump as the voice comes from the speaker again. Clearing my throat, I answer, “J-Juliana Thorne.”

  Silence. I’m left standing there with my thumb poised over the silver button while the rest of my body is angled toward the car. I should leave. I will. My hand falls just as an electric buzz comes from the door, followed by the click of a lock disengaging.

  “Come in.” The speaker crackles. “Take the elevator to the third floor.”

  With one last glance at the car waiting behind me, I enter the building, fighting a sense of trepidation with every step. It’s surprisingly clinical for the lair of a madman. The entrance opens onto a small hallway, which branches off in two directions. One leads to a dead end, while the other stops before a set of silver elevator doors.

  I strike the button for the third—and topmost—floor, and seconds later, the doors part, revealing another hallway, this one carpeted in a dark shade of gray and lined with black walls. The only illumination is cast by lit sconces glowing a dim, fiery orange.

  How melancholic. Did he decorate with the intention to intimidate in mind?

  It’s only as my heels sink into the plush flooring that I remember his blindness. Supposed blindness. I close my eyes, imagining how this view might “appear” to someone like him. Even behind my eyelids, the muted color scheme makes the darkness feel heavier. Thicker. My skin heats when I near a sconce. I pass it, the world cools again. Hot. Cold. The dueling sensations go to war over my flesh with every step I take. My fingers graze the smooth surface of the wall, only to suddenly meet air. A doorway?

  I open my eyes.

  Damien likes his workspace dark. Few lights illuminate what the daylight filtering in through sparse windows doesn’t. Wooden floors pick up my footsteps and broadcast them loudly to the man at work in the center of the room, hunched over a wooden table.

  Behind him, arched windows display swaths of the waterfront and little else. The room itself is massive, with vaulted ceilings that amplify the slightest disturbance. Like my thready breathing and his heavy sigh.

  Though he’s wearing jeans, there’s nothing at all casual conveyed by the ensemble. Tension enhances the muscle revealed by the short sleeves of his gray shirt. Every piece is tailored to perfection, impressive even from this distance. The man treats his body like his art, no stitch placed without intent.

  “You came.” He pushes back from the table and inclines his head in my direction. “Though I expected you to contact me by other means. I shall have to remind Carla as to the importance of my privacy.”

  My heart lurches. Charming Carla. Have I unknowingly gotten her into trouble?

  “I insisted,” I lie, disguising it behind a forced laugh. Haha. “She thought I’d appreciate your art.”

  “Now that is interesting,” Damien muses. He strokes his thumb along his chin. The fingers of that hand are black at the tips. From sketching, judging from the materials spread out before him. He’s working on a large piece of paper using only sticks of charcoal placed at strategic positions. “I’ve never questioned Carla’s judgment before.”

  He’s unreadable behind the blindfold, and his neutral tone obscures whether he means the statement as a threat. Left to decipher him blindly, my nerves dance with indecision. To tense or not? Fight or flight?

  I settle on neither. For now.

  “Anyway,” he continues, waving his hand through the air before grabbing a piece of charcoal with it. “All that matters is you’ve changed your mind. I’ll make the arrangements to return my painting and you may have your doll—”

  “No. I haven’t changed my mind… What are you doing?” I draw closer to him when I shouldn’t.

  He started sketching again while he spoke, and the rough contours catch my eye. A woman. She’s outstretched over white paper, her limbs formed of inky black. Unseeing eyes stare out as her lips contort around a final, gasping breath.

  “It’s beautiful.” The words spill from me without permission, but in my head, they aren’t quite a compliment. Beautiful. Ugly. Grotesque. “How can you—”

  “Don’t touch.” He grabs my wrist before I even register reaching out. How? He tugs when I try to snatch the limb away, tightening his grip. “Beautiful,” he says tacitly. “I thought you said it was terrible.”

  I twist my wrist to no avail. He’s too strong. The pads of his fingers capture sinew and bone beneath them and press just hard enough to sting.

  “Let me go—”

  “What are you wearing?” He cocks his head as if sensing something that I can’t, his nostrils flared.

  “Get off!” I tug my arm again. “Let go.”

  “Perdóname. What are you wearing?”

  Snark is my first instinct. “A dress,” I spit out.

  “And?” Impatience seeps from him like the poison from my oleander. Invisible. Deceptive. Like he’s hunting for something.

  “And…” I look down at my feet. “Heels.”

  He frowns, still unsatisfied with my answer. “And?”

  “And nothing.” Then I remember my newest gift. Swallowing hard, I add, “And…a rose in my hair.”

  He lets me go and his hand drifts toward a piece of charcoal before he flattens it against the table instead. “I take it that you appreciated my gift.”

  He laughs and the deep, guttural rumble robs me of my senses for a brief moment. I blink. He and the rest of the room disappear. Reappears. Disappears.

  With my eyes still closed, I utter my reply. “Very much so.”

  A sound catches in his throat. Ah. Not quite a laugh. He’s amused. He’s annoyed. “Por favor. Tell me, what color is your dress, Juliana?”

  “Why?” Trying to decipher him triggers a dull throbbing in my temples.

  The discomfort isn’t because of the question itself, however. It’s how he asked it. Politely. Curiously.

  “Black,” I finally admit.

  Another partial laugh is my reward. �
�A lie.”

  I glance at him sharply. “How can you tell?” Maybe he isn’t so blind after all.

  His gaze isn’t on me, but focused straight ahead, toward the light coming in from one of the windows. “I know.”

  “Well, then you should also know that I’ve decided to keep the painting.” Have I? Only now do I feel like examining my reasons for coming here in the first place. To evade Simon, possibly. To thank Mr. Villa for his thoughtful gift. To hide. To concede. To refuse. “You can burn the doll.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Ms. Thorne.” His tone dips an octave deeper than before. Picking up a thinner stick of charcoal, he continues to sketch, adding detail to an outstretched hand. There goes at least one mystery: He has to see. There’s no other way he could be so precise. “I trust you can show yourself out.”

  Squaring my shoulders, I turn to do just that—but I’ve barely gone a step before he calls out, “By the way, Juliana. You sound different in white.”

  “How did you…” My footsteps falter, my heart clenching painfully. “Fine,” I croak rather than accuse him of lying out loud. “You want your painting back? Let’s make a fair trade, then. You give me something I want. I give you what you want.”

  “Your doll isn’t sufficient enough?” he counters.

  “It’s already served its purpose.” I think of Simon and shudder. He couldn’t have planned a more memorable way to present his Sammy replica than this—held hostage by a newer monster. “So do you want to trade or not?”

  “Trade. Information, perhaps? Like that of your father and his reputable donors and the careful, gilded cage he’s built around you that you can’t even see?”

  “No,” I say hoarsely. “Don’t you dare talk about him—”

  “Then what?” He’s still sketching when I turn around, his posture angled toward the drawing, conveying complete disinterest in me. “What could the daughter of Heyworth Thorne want from me?” he wonders.

  My answer escapes in a rush. “I…I want you to paint me.”

  Do I? The veracity of the answering pinch in my stomach surprises me. Yes.

  “Paint you?” He sounds too soft. Like I suggested he stick a brush up his ass rather than use one.

  I’m flashed back to last night. What was that word he used? Insult.

  “If you even can,” I add, returning to the table one halting step at a time. “For all I know, it could be a ruse, just like your so-called blindness. Dad—Judge Thorne told me that you really use them to—”

  “I’m sure he told you plenty of things about me,” he says dismissively. “I could tell you more about him.”

  The implied threat has the effect of shutting me up.

  “So the woman who calls my art terrible wants me to paint her. Would this piece hang in your father’s office, I wonder? A gift for when he runs again for mayor?”

  “How did you know that?” The second I reply, I recognize his statement for the bait it was.

  “Only a man as conceited as your father would demand more power rather than reflect on his past misuse of it,” he smugly retorts. “And only his daughter would desire what she considers terrible.”

  I attempt to shrug off the venom in his tone but wind up flinching. His accent can cut like a whip when he wants it to. “There are worse things to be called than that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  Like perfect.

  The drawing he’s working on now is anything but. It’s goddamn terrible. Beautiful lines. Cruel, honest mortality.

  “Por qué?” He drops the stick of charcoal and it makes a stray line in the wrong place, marring the woman’s detailed torso. Then it rolls off the table and hits the floor, continuing toward me. “And how should I paint you?”

  I can imagine the answer he expects: prettily.

  “Like them,” I say instead—and there is no need to elaborate. I want him to paint me naked. Dead. Honest.

  This time, Damien doesn’t reply. His fingers fan out in front of him, trapping the sketch beneath them. Then they curl, crumpling the drawing into a ball, which he tosses onto the floor.

  “Explain,” he says, invoking that harsh, commanding tone.

  My lips part, words spilling out on cue. “How do you see them?” I’m closer to the table before I realize it, bending to snatch the discarded sketch. Despite how protective he seems to be of his art, he doesn’t warn me away. “How do you pose them?”

  Another question goes unanswered as I unfurl the drawing and observe it up close.

  “Come here.”

  My eyes cut to him sharply. No, every nerve in my body warns. He’s got them on red alert, humming with nervous energy. “W-why?”

  He raises his hand and crooks one beckoning finger. “Come.”

  “No,” I say. Liar. I’m already inching closer to the opposite end of the table.

  A blur of motion is all I register before my chin is in his grip. Startlingly warm fingertips tilt it expertly while five more come to graze the side of my jaw.

  I suck in a breath. He has the softest hands I’ve ever felt. Like velvet. Hands that must wear gloves to perform any menial tasks. Hands that could only commit the most sterile of murders.

  Dangerous, sinful hands.

  “You want me to paint you?” His breath fans my cheeks, unbearably warm.

  “Yes…” For some reason, I don’t shy from his touch. I let him examine me. There’s more to the manipulation of his fingers than a desire to intimidate. They capture the curve of my face. The swell of my cheek. My hairline.

  Finally, he sits back and opens a drawer concealed on his end of the table. From it, he fishes out a fresh sheet of paper, and with the thinnest strip of charcoal, he makes a few soft lines. Gradually, a woman’s face takes shape. It’s round, her features average. Some might call her attractive if it weren’t for her exaggeratedly wide eyes and pursed lips.

  Recognition hits in a slow-burning realization. It’s me.

  Then again, she isn’t me.

  There’s fear in her eyes, more apparent the more of her he reveals in lines of black. She’s thin—too thin—standing tall. Her hands are outstretched, grasping at the air in front of her. Unlike his other creations, she’s fully dressed in a simple, white sheath dress.

  I’m tempted to accuse him of feigning blindness again—but the details are vague enough to be guesses. Besides, it’s the woman’s expression upon which he lavished the most insulting attention. Her dour, terse frown could only be described as…lost.

  Or terrified.

  “Is this meant to scare me?” My voice rasps. I find myself licking my lips and swallowing hard to ease a sudden dryness in my throat. I’ve been standing here, watching him longer than I’ve realized. The angle of light coming in through the window is sharper, dimmer, and my ankles throb, confined in my heels.

  “Scare?” With a sigh, Damien finishes off the last stroke. Then he lifts the drawing and offers it to me.

  I scoff. That caricature looks nothing like the woman I strive to be. She’s pathetic. Weak. She’s the person I want to drown in a bottle of wine. “That’s the best you can do?”

  As I reach for it, Damien withdraws the page just beyond my range. “Uh-huh.” He nods once, indicating my body, I presume. Namely what I’m still clutching in my fist. “Exchange.”

  I consider tossing both scraps of paper into the trash. I should.

  In the end, I let the discarded drawing fall onto the table within his reach, and he lets me pull the fresh drawing from his grip.

  “Do you feel that was a fair trade?” he asks, while I retreat toward the light of the nearest window and observe his distorted creation up close. She’s not me—despite how uncannily familiar her nose is.

  She’s not.

  “I expended the energy to create both drafts,” he continues. “You stole one without permission and yet bartered it for another. So…” From the corner of my eye, his silhouette flickers. “Is this a fair trade?”

&nb
sp; Ignoring him, I sweep my gaze along the drawing again. Then I tear it in half and let both pieces fall. “There,” I tell him, unnerved by how patiently he’s sitting, no emotion revealed whatsoever. “Now they’re both unwanted. Besides, I thought artists like a challenge. That looks nothing like me.”

  “Is that so?” He stands swiftly, catching me off guard. He must have had the cane propped against the table, because it’s in his hand now. It extends, tapping the floor before him, and he advances on me far more quickly than he should be able to.

  Instinct seizes control of my feet, propelling me backward. Back…back. Until I hit a wall and can’t go any farther. I’m forced to watch as he approaches, but I’m offered no warning when he touches me this time. Bold and sure, his fingers graze the side of my throat, tracing the pulse thrumming there.

  “I’m not so sure of that…” His mouth tilts downward, his thumb pressing harder.

  “W-what are you doing?” I avert my gaze to the opposite wall—but I don’t move. For some insane reason, I endure the second appraisal, and this time, he extends his search.

  Down my throat, following the midline of my collarbone. A ragged gasp escapes my lips as unfamiliar heat creeps through the satin over my rib cage. Too low. Then even lower, down to my hips. He keeps the contact featherlight. Barely noticeable.

  Yet inescapable.

  Finally, he steps back, and his cane retracts, able to be slipped inside his pocket.

  “I would not question my sight if I were you, Ms. Thorne,” he declares, the corner of his mouth quirked. He’s amused once again.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Villa, I don’t feel like arguing sight accuracy with a blind man.”

  “And you shouldn’t,” he bites back. “How frustrating it must be to have your sight and yet not be able to see things as they are.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He laughs and shakes his head. “I do not think you’d understand.”

  Before I can voice a comeback, he reaches for me. Two quick fingers capture the rose behind my ear and yank it free.

  “Stop!” My trembling fingers swipe at nothing.

  He’s too quick. His free hand crushes the bloom, molesting the petals. In pale clumps, they litter the floor, finally followed by the discarded stem.