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235 pages, Paperback
First published July 11, 2017
“Long ago I made a deathbed promise. I need you to help me keep it as I’m helping you to keep yours. I promise, you will understand in time, Mona. You’ll understand it all.”
“The devil wants your soul. I only want your body”
“You shouldn’t let a man shake your hand for less than a hundred dollars, Mona.”
“The art world didn’t care about young women selling their bodies. They only cared if someone dared to break their rules of composition, of acceptable subject matter. You could show a naked woman hiding her face or lying supine and limp as a wet rag. God forbid he paint a girl who dared them to look her in the eyes”
She’d never met a man who conformed so closely to her ideal.
"I have no interest in love or marriage from you . Nor do I wish to take you to dinner. I simply want to fuck you in various ways that please me. It’s my preference.”
He made an animalistic sound as he pumped into the girl from behind and the girl let out a girlish whimper. Mona grew wet watching, terribly wet, and she was already eager for her turn with the satyr.
He’d cracked open something in her, some dormant, latent proclivity for pain and punishment and being treated like a possession. She could never go back to the way it was before.
”You won’t do anything perverse to me?”
“I’ll do everything perverse to you. But you still shouldn’t be afraid.”
“You smile like the devil,” Mona said.
“The devil doesn’t smile,” he said. “The devil smirks.”
“You speak as if you know him.”
“Would it shock you if I said I did?”
He was a god to her now, a god of sex and sin. If he could have fucked her forever, she would let him. In hell where the sins of lust were punished, they said the lascivious damned tore each other apart with their desires, and the rent and bleeding pieces still found ways to meet and mate with each other.
“You’re sitting on a goldmine, Mona. Literally”
She blushed. “I’ve never had my vagina called a goldmine before.”
“Perhaps I was referring to your arse.”
“Oh yes, hadn’t thought of that.”
“You were meant to do this,” he said softly. “You’ll see.”
“Why me?” she asked. “Millions of women in this country, millions in yours… why me?”
“Millions of paintings in the world. Only one Mona Lisa. Billions of women in this world. Only one you, Mona Lisa St. James.”
His money made her a whore, but his cock had made her his slave. She never wanted to taste freedom again. She only wanted to taste him.
He smiled at her. His dark eyes glinted like struck flint.
"You smile like the devil,” Mona said.
"The devil doesn’t smile,” he said. "The devil smirks.”
He was an angel of beauty and pain.
He was the devil incarnate.
Angel.
Demon.
"The things you do to me…I’d never dare dream them, much less do them. And yet, when I’m with you, there is no game I wouldn’t play, nothing of my body would I keep from you. You leave me and I go mad with waiting. You leave me and you are my every waking thought and my every sleeping dream. And if I knew when you were returning to me, I would count the minutes until I saw you again.”
"A woman with power. A woman who owned her body and wasn’t afraid to sell it. That painting is art because it terrified its first viewers. Art should be dangerous, you know. It should say something to society that society doesn’t want to hear.”
"You aren’t dreaming,” he said. "But if it were a dream, would you want to wake up?” he asked.
A good question. A fair question. A hard question, but one she answered easily. "Never.”