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Girls had never interested me much. When I’d started to obsess over my paintings, my uncle had hired a woman to… well, to try to lure me to the sins of the flesh instead. He’d made me promise to try, so I did—for a while, anyway, until I grew bored of her and decided to end it. It had taken me maybe an hour, at the most.
So, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what a woman’s body contained. The heated space between their legs, their cunts, the soft moans that could come from them while you were inside of them…
I preferred screams. I wondered what sort of scream Brianna had.
Brianna. She shouldn’t make my mind wander like this. She shouldn’t make me want her in general, but the feistiness, the defiantness… no one else around here came close. Everyone was always tripping over themselves to try to get with me or become friends with me, purely because of the money. The Prince of Eastcreek High.
I was no prince. More like a demon.
When I pulled us into the garage, Brianna got out of the car without saying a word to me. She walked inside the house ahead of me, not sparing me a second glance. Ignoring me. And I let her, mostly because the chef my uncle had hired was here, starting to cook whatever dinner she’d been hired to cook.
I went straight to the pool house, shutting myself as far away from Brianna as I could. I threw the lock, so she or the chef wouldn’t be able to waltz in. Cracking my knuckles, I walked into my studio.
It was supposed to be a pool house, where you hung out in the summer in between dips in the pool, so you wouldn’t get that chlorine smell inside the main house. It had ample storage for any pool toys you might have—though we didn’t have any. No, the pool house had long since transformed into my own personal painting studio.
I’d set up in the living room, got rid of most of the furniture. Old paintings were scattered along the walls, their canvases long since dried. The curtains on all of the windows were drawn, so no one could see inside.
One thing each canvas had in common? Their color scheme: red. Red was my main color. Red graced every single piece I did, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I mixed my own paint, you see, so each red was a little different than the rest, some thicker and deeper while others were lighter and thinner, like watercolor.
Hmm. It’d been a while since I’d gotten myself a new color—
Before that thought could take root in my head, I pushed it away, knowing my uncle would get pissed at me for entertaining it. Even though the man could never control me, he did his best to advise me, and new reds for my collection were always something of a risk.
I had a pretty big easel set up in the center of the living room, though no canvas sat on it. I went to grab a large, blank canvas, carrying it over and setting it upon the easel before getting myself some paint. And then I got to work, letting the image flow out of me like it always did.
I painted with no sketched base. I let instinct guide me every time. Sometimes the end result was just a mixture of reds and oranges on the canvas, and other times, you could tell it was meant to be something else, just through a lens of reds and maroons.
When I was painting, I was never freer. Where others would see nothing but red, I saw blood and pain and misery put onto a canvas. I saw death and destruction and mayhem, confessions and lies, heaven and hell. I saw it all. I painted it all.
Back when my mother was alive, I had nowhere to place my passion, my obsession. It was only after that I began to channel it into painting, and a few years after that that Alistair realized painting could only keep me occupied for so long. I needed a special kind of paint. I couldn’t paint without it.
He’d tried to keep me on the straight and narrow, but come on. He couldn’t stop me, and he knew it. He didn’t lecture me on it, not anymore, because he knew he’d be a hypocrite if he did. My uncle might be the charming businessman to most everyone in Eastcreek, the King, the Lord of Montgomery Manor, but I knew his real machinations.
My uncle was a hunter, just like me. I liked to think I inherited the same genes he had, only it had passed over my mother and gone straight to me.
No one understood. It’s why I’d thought it would remain my uncle and me forever.
But no, now I had Brianna, because Alistair thought she’d distract me enough to keep me out of trouble… or maybe he hoped trouble would remain inside the walls of this house, that all of my hatred, all of my dark desires, would fall upon her.
It was bullshit. It was all bullshit. Brianna might interest me a little—more than any girl had ever interested me—but if anything, she’d drive me to old habits with how furious she made me. My old habits tended to die hard, emphasis on thediepart.
I took my dinner into the pool house, working on the painting all night. It wasn’t until the second night of working on it that it started to take shape, that I began to recognize what I was painting.
It wasn’t easy to use so many shades of red, harder to make an image pop using such colors, but when night fell Tuesday and I took a step back from the canvas, I saw the blurry edges of a person in the middle of the red. The abstract shapes took form in my mind, and I knew instantly who it was supposed to be.
Brianna.
But it wasn’t quite finished yet.
Wednesday, I fixed it up a little, added more depth to it by mixing other colors with the red. At five, I knew I had to go get my dinner—and I planned on bringing it back here and eating it while I painted, but when I opened the door to the pool house to walk to the main house, I saw Brianna standing there, her hand out, like she’d been going for the knob.
Her hand dropped to her side, and I narrowed my eyes at her. “What are you doing?”
“Emily wanted me to come get you. Dinner’s ready.” Her eyes shifted away from me, and she tried to peer around me, into the pool house. “You’re always in there.”
I stepped out, pulling the door closed behind me. “It’s where I work. You’re not welcome inside.”
She scoffed, “You went through my stuff. Why can’t I go through yours?”
