THE MURDERER'S MUSE

Lilith 5 stories

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Summary

THE MURDERER'S MUSE Vespera Roux used to believe monsters were something you could run from. Now she knows better, because hers has already caught her, and he never really let her go. Calder Noctis doesn't hide what he is. A collector of moments, a curator of fear, a man who finds devotion in the things that make other men recoil. He took Vespera not to silence her, but to compose her, to shape her terror into something he could keep. In his house, far from anyone who might come looking, he plays his games and sings his rhymes, and she runs on bare feet through halls that all lead back to him. But fear is a strange architecture. The longer Vespera survives inside it, the more she learns its rooms, and the more she starts to understand that the same hands that break her are the only ones that ever catch her when she falls. Calder doesn't want her healed. He wants her his: ruined beautifully, completely dependent, his masterpiece painted one scar at a time. She should hate him. Some nights, she still tells herself she does. But obsession is never one-sided for long. And when the world outside finally comes looking for what he's taken, Calder will have to decide how far he's willing to go to keep the only thing he's ever loved from being pried out of his hands, even if that means burning it all down with her still inside.