Dark Art

Expected in Winter 2026…

Aria Renfrew never set out to become a serial killer. No, she had her heart set on getting married, learning to bake, and restoring an old French chateau in the sleepy town of Poeymirau. But she’s never been afraid of getting her hands dirty, and when her dreams are torn away from her, the only way to get closure is through a very different kind of DIY.

Art Russo has been killing for as long as he can remember, starting with the papa who made his life a living hell. As a nameless Russian assassin, a weapon aimed at a target, he honed his skills with surgical precision. But that’s all in the past. He’s semi-retired now, busy wrangling his accidental family and running a successful art gallery. The problem? He’s really fucking bored.

When a chance meeting over murder sparks Art’s interest, Aria finds herself falling deeper into the dark than she ever wanted to go. Facilitating dramatic deaths isn’t Art’s only skill; he knows how to push her buttons too.

With Art driving her round the bend, travesties of justice happening daily, and the roof leaking every time it rains, Aria doesn’t have time for any more drama. But residents keep disappearing in Poeymirau, and the local cops couldn’t organise une soûlerie in a vineyard. Who’s indulging in a little extracurricular entertainment?

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*Unedited* sneak peek…

It started as a joke. As a question asked at the end of a late-night bitching session with my late fiancé’s sister and our friend Ember. Despite being an actual scientist, Bee still thought that two-for-one cocktails were the answer to life’s problems, and it was easier to go along with her plan than to argue.

How would you commit the perfect murder?

Until we began drowning our sorrows that evening, thoughts of dispatching men to hell had been confined to sleep, to those dream-slash-nightmares that made me wake up sweating, feeling both exhilarated and slightly sick.

Well, ha-de-ha, the joke was on us.

Because it turned out there was no such thing as the perfect murder. We’d killed two men so far, and their deaths had been varying degrees of messy. But the more you practice, the better you get, or so Ember claimed. The only important thing was not getting caught.

Something I was failing miserably at on this cold January night.

Ansel von Amsing’s fingernails dug into my ankle as I crawled across the grubby carpet, and I winced as I thought of the DNA evidence. He coughed and wheezed, blood pulsing out of the hole in his chest as my mistakes flashed before me in the glow of the lamp on his nightstand. A killer who was afraid of the dark. Go figure.

I should have used a different sedative.

I shouldn’t have hesitated with the knife when his eyelids popped open.

I should have stayed at home and tiled another bathroom.

“Tu es à moi, petit poussin,” Ansel growled as I kicked at his hand with the heel of my other boot.

What did that mean? “Poussin” was “chicken,” right? Little chicken. Rude, but he had been fond of spatchcocking his victims. Alleged victims. His fancy lawyer had cast enough doubt that the judges and jury hadn’t convicted him, and he’d got away with his crimes. Poor Ansel, so weak and infirm that he could barely get out of bed, let alone heft a dead woman into the Gare du Nord in a suitcase.

But it had been lies, all of it. He seemed pretty freaking strong to me. Dirty nails dug through my Tyvek suit and into the flesh of my calf as he held me in a death grip, and I tried to unpeel his fingers. Surely all that blood loss had to start affecting him soon? It wasn’t gushing out the way I’d hoped, but it was definitely more than a trickle, and I suspected I’d hit a vein, not an artery. The blood was dark red rather than scarlet.

I tried kicking him.

Something cracked, a bone in his hand, I thought, and when he let out an unearthly howl, I thanked my not-so-lucky stars he lived in the countryside and his nearest neighbour was quarter of a mile away. This was such a beautiful part of France. The trips I’d made here while planning Ansel’s untimely end hadn’t exactly been a hardship. I couldn’t regret them. But all those plans, and this was how it would end… With my death, not his. The four backpackers he’d picked up in the bars of Cannes would never rest in peace, my double life would come to an end, and Ansel—also known as the Le Tueur de Bagages Laissés, the Left Luggage Killer—would be free to pick out his next victim.

No.

No. It can’t end like this. I still have so much to do.

A bunch more men to kill, plus my blog subscribers were waiting for the next episode, and it was the second instalment of a two-parter. They’d slaughter me in the reviews if I didn’t release it on time.

I scrabbled with my fingers, grasping for something, anything solid to pull myself away from this monster. And found…a handcuff? It was attached to the end of the radiator. He brought his victims here? To his home? What was he doing, burying them in the backyard? I kicked again, and the time, I hit cartilage. His nose broke with a satisfying crunch.

“Don’t call me a chicken, you freaking psycho.”

I spoke English, but he understood me well enough and switched language. In other circumstances, I might have been impressed—my own attempts to learn French weren’t going so well.

“One of us is going to die today, little chick. I’m going to fuck your corpse.”

Eeuw. Who did that? Blood bubbled through his nose, and he coughed it all over me. Double yuck. Now he gripped both of my ankles, and when he pulled, I lost my grip on the handcuff and grabbed a drawer instead. It popped free of the chest, spewing its contents all over the floor. Socks, Y-fronts, a ladies’ purse, a desiccated human hand. Oh my gosh. A hand? He kept a freaking hand in his underwear drawer? Didn’t he understand serial killer 101? You weren’t meant to keep trophies. Trophies got you caught. And so did using curare as part of your murder kit, if my current predicament was anything to go by, but that was an easy mistake to make. The only way to safely test the drug’s potency was by experimentation with living creatures, and the thought of testing on animals turned my stomach. Plus Ansel had ripped the syringe out of my hand before he got a full dose, which didn’t help either. And he was supposed to be drunk. Why wasn’t he drunk? I’d watched him down half a bottle of home-brewed calvados while he watched TV, but clearly he’d developed a tolerance to alcohol poisoning over the years.

“I’m going to slice you open and fuck your guts. Fill every cavity with my seed,” Ansel promised, right before I beaned him with the purse.

Would stomach acid dissolve a penis? That was a question I’d never considered, or ever thought I’d need to. Maybe Bee would know? The contents of the purse burst free, a phone, a wallet, breath mints, a canister of…wait… What was that?

Ansel settled his fetid bulk over me, pinning me in place. Blood continued to leak from his chest, and although Tyvek claimed to be both tear- and water-resistant, today was really going to test that promise. I gagged on the smell—bad breath mixed with the coppery tang of blood and an underlying odour of stale tobacco smoke.

“You should brush your teeth,” I told him. “Dental hygiene is important.”

“What—”

The instant he opened his mouth, I hit him full force with the pepper spray his last victim had gifted me from beyond the grave. He reared back, giving me enough space to fumble the spare knife out of my pocket and finish what I started. The blade slipped between his third and fourth ribs, and this time, the blood ran scarlet.

Ansel von Amsing was right—one of us was going to die today, but it wouldn’t be me.

I lay there, breathing hard, my heart hammering so hard it threatened to crack my ribcage. Nausea rolled in my stomach. Not because of the blood—I was used to that—but because of the close call. Starting down this path had been a suicide mission, but I hadn’t expected to come face to face with death quite so soon.

Nor had I expected the applause that came from the doorway.

“Brava.” The accent was Italian, the voice male, deep with a slight rasp, and I blinked as he flipped on the overhead light. “Bellisima.”

My unfucked guts seized, the momentary peace that came with taking a life shattered, and I gripped the knife harder as I rolled over to see what fresh hell tonight had brought me. The stranger was leaning against the door jamb, legs crossed at the ankles, a faint smile playing across his lips. Tufts of dirty blonde hair stuck out from beneath his ball cap, and the harsh glare from the bare bulb left his eyes in shadow.

“Who the hell are you?”

A cop? Was he an undercover cop? Had the radiator handcuffs been an omen? A groan slipped from my lips. Yes, I’d known when I made the pact with Bee and Ember that there was a chance I’d get caught, but this was too soon. There were still so many monsters left to die.

“Think of me as an interested party,” the stranger said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

A shrug. “You can put the knife down.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

I eyed up the gap in the doorway. If I launched myself at full speed, I could barrel past him and out the back door. I’d left it open, just in case I needed to make a hasty escape. Unless the stranger had closed it. What if he’d blocked my car in? No, no, no. Think positive, Aria. There had to be a way out of this.

I ran.

Approximately half a second later, I found myself face down on the filthy floor, the blond guy’s knee pressing into my back and my nose mere inches from the spreading pool of blood. My knife skittered across the floor. Super. That went well. The metallic aroma clogged my throat and sent another wave of nausea through me.

“Don’t.”

One word from the stranger’s lips, and the nausea turned to full-on fear. I tried to buck him off, but it was like being squashed by a boulder. Now I knew how Wile E. Coyote felt. I desperately searched my mind for Ember’s self-defence tips and came up empty.

“W-w-what do you want from me?”

“You need to learn to control that flight response. It’ll get you into trouble.”

“Oh, you think?”

The silence stretched between us, the only sound the thump-thump-thump of my heart hammering against my ribcage. Finally, the stranger spoke, more to himself than to me, it seemed.

“What am I going to do with you?”

“Buy me dinner and tell me I’m pretty?”

Casting myself in the role of class clown had saved me from the bullies more than once during my high-school years, but humour was way, way out of its depth here. I was ninety percent sure this guy was unhinged. Which I realise might have sounded hypocritical given my situation, but I’d never splattered a woman across a dead guy’s floor. The pool of blood was inching closer.

Could Ansel have a partner in crime? Was this man a killer too? If he was a cop, I’d be wearing handcuffs by now. Maybe they were friends? Had I just murdered his bestie, and now he was gearing up for revenge? Plausible, but hadn’t he applauded my efforts?

“I swear I won’t mention you were here,” I tried. “Who would I even tell? I barely saw your face at all, plus I have a terrible memory.”

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

He wasn’t? “My knees are bruised, my elbows are bruised, I can’t breathe, and I’m about to drown in Ansel’s blood.”

“If you can’t breathe, you can’t drown.”

“Fine, I’ll suffocate first. Does that make you happy?”

“If I let you get up, do you promise you won’t do anything stupid? Like trying to stab me again?”

“I wasn’t trying to stab you; I was trying to exit the damn building.”

The stranger didn’t reply, but the pressure on my back eased. I gulped in air as I pushed back onto my knees, trying desperately not to show him how badly I was shaking.

“Why are you here?”

“To do the same thing as you.” He tilted his head to one side, studying my handiwork. “But with slightly less mess. Next time, just break the skull with a sledgehammer, and then you don’t have to wait for some drug to take effect.” He glanced down at Ansel’s slumped corpse. “Or not take effect.”

“The curare worked perfectly last time. Don’t judge me.”

He raised one bushy eyebrow. “Last time? You’ve done this before?”

Shit. “I meant that from what I’ve researched on the internet, curare always works.”

And I’d still had most of the original bottle left until Fernando, the plump, one-eyed tabby who’d decided to call Château Corbideau home, followed me into the cellar and knocked it off the shelf. Bee had cooked up another batch, but I guess it wasn’t as strong as the original.

“Sure, tesorina.” This admittedly-not-entirely-ugly stranger was starting to get on my nerves. “I believe you. Many wouldn’t.”

“First, you stood by and watched this freak threaten to come in my cavities, and now you’re going to act all condescending?”

He ignored the “condescending” comment and stepped forward, avoiding the blood pool as he first pocketed my knife and then checked Ansel’s pulse with one leather-gloved hand.

“Dead.”

“Thanks, I already got that.”

“It always pays to check. Smart people play possum.”

“I stabbed him in the heart.”

“A rib can deflect the blade.”

“You think my aim was off?” When the interloper didn’t answer, I scrambled to my feet and nearly slipped over. “You thought I missed, didn’t you? Unbelievable.”

Wisely, he didn’t answer. The blood was starting to congeal, a gloopy mess with blobs in it. Blobs? What were those blobs?

“He was a smoker,” the psycho said, answering my unasked question. “Maybe you scooped out a bit of lung.”

“Yeuch. It looks like the filling from a cherry pie.”

And now I could never eat cherries again.

The stranger peered closer. “If your pie looks like that, then your baking skills are on a par with your assassination abilities.”

Thanks for that. “Stop talking.”

Of course, he ignored that suggestion. “Is that a fucking hand?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Mr. Know-it-All?”

He stopped to pluck it from the wreckage of the room and held it up to the light. “Wonder what happened to the rest of her?”

“Put that down.”

He didn’t. He walked it across the chest of drawers, humming softly to himself. The incy wincy spider climbed up the water spout…

“You think Ansel was making a low-budget sequel to The Addams Family?” he asked.

“You’re sick.”

“Then I guess that makes you twisted. Do you have a plan for our friend here?”

I scoffed. “Of course I have a plan.”

Correction: I’d had a plan. And that plan had gone south now that there was blood everywhere. It should have been easy—pop him full of curare, then inform him of the error of his ways while he suffocated. There was no satisfaction in this if the victims didn’t realise why they’d been chosen. If they didn’t understand that women were out there fighting for justice. Once he’d breathed his last, I’d planned to roll him into a body bag and haul him out to my SUV, wrestle him into the hidden compartment under the back seat, and drive very carefully back to the chateau, making sure to observe all traffic laws as I went. Until today, the transportation phase was the part of the task I’d feared the most. Now, I realised it was a walk in the park compared to the actual murder.

The stranger’s lips curved into the faintest smirk as he pulled a camera out of his pocket and snapped a few pictures of Ansel’s twisted remains before turning back to me.

“Dare I ask what that plan is?”

“Put the freaking camera away. What is this, murder tourism?”

“My client requires proof of death.”

“Your…client?” Client… Death… Proof… Contract killer? Holy shit. This weirdo was an actual hitman? Ohmigosh, ohmigosh, ohmigosh. “Wait, are you getting paid for this?”

“You’re not getting paid for this?” He sounded incredulous.

“No, I’m just doing my civic duty.”

“So, Ms. Twisted, you just woke up one morning and figured you’d take out the trash?”

Ms. Twisted? We were giving each other nicknames now? That suggested a level of familiarity I was entirely too uncomfortable with.

“Well, it was a little more complicated than that.”

“Did von Amsing fuck with you personally?”

“I’m just not a fan of serial killers, okay?”

“I hate to point out the obvious, tesorina, but if you’ve done this before, you are a serial killer.”

“No I—” Hmm, he did have a point. “I’m a serial killer killer. That’s different.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It is. Totally different. Don’t give me a freaking lecture, Sick.”

“I’m just here for the entertainment.”

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CONTENT WARNINGS

                    

If you have concerns about any specific triggers, please contact me via the contact form.

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