The Red (The Godwicks, #1)

by Tiffany Reisz

Your complexion is lighter than I prefer but it will show bites and blushes well. You wear your hair tastefully. Most women these days wear their hair shorn off or unbound and undone. Takes the magic out of the hair if it’s already down and loose before we’ve gone to bed. You wear yours pinned up and it makes me imagine what it looks like down. I like that very much.”

“And muscular. Sort of. They have lovely veins in them. I like male hands with veins. I noticed them the first time I saw you. And surely you noticed me noticing them if you’re such a connoisseur of women.”

Art should be dangerous, you know. It should say something to society that society doesn’t want to hear. Do you know what the opposite of art is? Propaganda. There’s too much of that in the world. Not enough art.

“I have trouble respecting a woman who gives away for free what she could sell for good money. Whores are the only women who know their own worth. I mean that.”

I don’t fault anyone who takes a man to the bank before going to bed with him. I wouldn’t let a strange man put his finger in my mouth and whores take far more into their bodies every single night. It’s skilled, brave work. Bless those lasses, they’ve saved my life and damned my soul.

“The devil wants your soul. I only want your body.”

“Malcolm…you told me not to love you. Don’t make me love you.”

“Would you give me permission to love you, sir?”

“You won’t love me next time I come to you, so enjoy it while you can.”

“You only love me tonight because of the beating. You understand that, don’t you?”

“It’s the intimacy of captor and captive. There’s nothing like it.”

“Can you keep me forever?”

“If I’m not like a girl, what am I like?” “Like an animal.”

“I hope you find a fine sweet young virgin someday to marry,” she said. “And I hope she opens her cunt for your brother and your father and your best friend the minute your back is turned.”

“There,” she said. “Now we’re exactly the same. You fucked me. I paid you. This is how it works.” His eyes were nearly red with fury. She smiled. “You are a whore,” he said. “Not today. Today I’m buying. So what does that make you?”

The image on the page was of a painting called Der Blutende. “The Bleeding Man.” The date was 1911 and the artist was Viennese painter Max Oppenheimer, a Jewish artist Hitler had labeled a “degenerate,” according to the caption. The painting was of a young man with dark hair. He had some sort of gauzy white garment falling down his thighs, partly revealing his flaccid penis. The man’s body was curved to the side as if he were in agony. His eyes glowed with pain and he held his hands to the center of his chest where blood was spattered and spurting. Did the blood come from his hands? Or from a wound on his chest? Apparently no one knew for sure. But Mona knew from one glance that the beautiful young man was bleeding from his heart, and he had to use his own hands to hold the heart and the blood inside himself.

That night she dreamt of The Bleeding Man again. In the second dream he died while inside of her and the red was everywhere, on her hands and on her chest and on her mouth as she drank the blood straight from his heart.

“If you were for sale I would pawn my soul to buy you,”