Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter One

Yuuhi handed me the sketch. The curvy, stylized woman sported a frock with structured draping along the shoulder and neck and legs. The flowing lines looked too effortless for how much time Nekane had spent agonizing over her sketchbook. My thumb lightly swiped over the indentation of the pen marks, like running along the wrinkles of a palm. "This is beautiful, but aren't fashion models supposed to be...?"

He pulled open the blinds at the far end of the master bedroom, which had since been converted to Nekane's workroom. Crisp daylight flooded the desks and their disorder of papers, magazine cut-outs, and orphaned pieces of fabric amongst the webs and fist-sized snarls of thread and pins and tape.

"She specializes in dressing a multitude of body types," he said. He joined me as I faced the mannequin that the sketch in my hand belonged to. The heavy satin clung to the dress form, pinned inside-out, hardly anything like the sketch so far.

I imagined the dress, what it would look like, and how it would look on a body like Ave's. "I couldn't wear a dress like this."

His dark green eyes switched to me, richly brown bangs scattered across his furrowed brow. "Why?"

"I don't know." My shoulders lifted and fell. I toyed with the bracelet around my wrist, the sketch dangling from my fingers. "I just don't think..."

Solara used to dress me up and paint my face like hers when I was still young enough to have to stretch my arms across the sink for my toothbrush. She'd smudge our eyes in shadow and comb our eyelashes darker and dabble red onto our lips. In the mirror, she was a woman.

In the mirror, I was playing dress-up.

I tucked hair behind my ear. "I'd be playing dress-up."

Whatever his eyes read as he surveyed me, I didn't want to see it. I kept my gaze on the wheels of the dress form and imagined legs in fancy stiletto shoes once the dress was finished and on the perfect body. He hooked his hand around the crook of my elbow and guided me over to the table. "Let's look at this."

He flipped open a three-inch ringed binder. Page after page of printed photos and clippings of models on the catwalk and in photoshoots flashed by until he reached the section of fancy evening gowns on nearly skeletal bodies. I couldn't help sparing a glance down at my own thighs, clad in sweats that did little to hide layers of compact muscle. I looked anything but feminine.

"A dress like this," he pointed to a pale, lacy gown with draping layers around a low neckline, fanning out at the hips, "with the bronze of your skin and your long neck, no one would think you're playing dress-up."

My eyes rolled. "My skin isn't bronze."

His fingers slipped into mine, weaving so that his shock of white flesh made me look even darker. "You're right, you're right. You're closer to gold." The corner of his mouth lifted into a crooked smirk, the leering type of smirk that belonged on bad men, and always worked on me in the worst kinds of ways.

The heat in my face betrayed the way I pursed my lips at him. "No frill."

"Alright. No frill." He nodded and flipped a few pages, past shades of white and antique pink and flesh tones, straight into the rainbow. He stopped on jewel tones of green and a neatly structured dress caught my eye, a high neckline, sleeveless, dropping into a curtain like the skirts from when I was born. He noticed my attention and gestured to the window of leg. "That's a pretty bold slit."