The Obsession Club

Portraits and Poisons❤️‍🔥

🥀Eva🥀

The candlelight always made Wetherhall’s chapel look older than stone, as if the whole building was made of smoke and secrets instead of granite. Tonight, it felt alive. The scent of melted wax clung to the walls, and incense burned in slow, curling threads, like veins stitched across the air.

I had been summoned. Again.

The letter this time wasn’t sealed with wax, but pressed with a faint smear of ink, as though someone had dipped their thumb in blackness and left a mark only I would recognize. It simply read:

> *“A portrait is only truth when it hurts. Midnight. Don’t be late.”*

I hadn’t planned to go. My body screamed against it, every nerve telling me to burn the letter, to lock my door, to pretend none of this existed. But the ache inside me—the one that had been growing louder with every whisper, every stolen glance—wouldn’t let me refuse.

The moment I crossed the chapel’s threshold, Callista Pryne greeted me like a queen. She wore crimson tonight, the fabric clinging like blood across her pale frame, her mask a delicate cage of silver thorns.

“Eva.” Her voice was velvet pulled taut. “Welcome back.”

The others were already waiting, gathered around a long oak table, its surface littered with glass vials, quills, and scattered rose petals. Paintings leaned against the walls—unfinished, grotesque, or beautiful depending on the angle.

But it was Lucian I noticed first.

He stood apart from the rest, one hand shoved into the pocket of his dark coat, the other ink-stained as always. His gaze found me immediately, fastening me in place. There was something unspoken in his expression—an almost feral anticipation.

“Tonight,” Callista announced, circling the table like a predator, “we make art from pain. We immortalize what bleeds. We prove that beauty demands sacrifice.”

A boy I vaguely recognized, slender with trembling fingers, set a canvas on the easel in the center of the room. A girl stepped forward, her mask made of fractured glass, her wrists bare. She pressed her palm to a silver needle, slicing herself open in silence, then smeared the blood across the canvas.

No one flinched.

“Art is truth,” Callista murmured, eyes glittering. “And truth, my darling muses, requires blood.”

The ritual continued in shadows and whispers. Some painted, some wrote, some played broken notes on instruments I had never seen outside antique shops. Every act demanded an offering.

And then, Lucian moved.

He stepped toward me, slow, deliberate, as though every motion had been scripted long before this night. His hands were stained with ink, his cuffs damp with something darker.

“Sit,” he said, his voice low, dangerous in how soft it was.

I obeyed.

The chair was cold beneath me, its wood carved with lines that bit into my palms when I clutched the arms. Lucian wheeled another easel forward, placing it directly before me. The blank canvas seemed more threatening than any blade.

“I want your likeness,” he whispered, so close I could feel the heat of his breath. “But not the kind anyone else could capture. I want the truth of you.”

I should have refused. I should have walked out the door and never looked back.

Instead, I said, “What do you need?”

His lips curved in the faintest smile, though his eyes remained severe, storm-grey and unblinking.

“Your patience. Your silence.” A pause. “And this.”

He reached for my wrist before I could stop him. The contact sent a shiver through me—cold and burning all at once. He held me gently, but with no room for refusal, turning my arm so that the pale underside of my skin faced upward. His thumb traced the faint blue vein there, slow, deliberate, reverent.

“You wear your fragility on the surface,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Every poet dreams of this line.”

My throat went dry. “You’re—”

“Don’t speak.”

He pressed the tip of his pen against my skin. Ink spread across me, sharp, cold, staining me where only he could see. He wasn’t writing words, not exactly, but fragments—strokes that curled into letters, then dissolved into shapes, as though he was translating me into a language only he knew.

Around us, the others went on with their rituals, some gasping, some laughing in manic bursts, but all I heard was the scratch of Lucian’s pen against my flesh.

“You’ll ruin me,” he whispered, and I wasn’t sure if he meant it as accusation or prophecy.

When he finally lifted his hand, my wrist was covered in black veins of ink, curling upward like vines. He turned back to the canvas and began to paint, his movements frantic, violent, almost unhinged. His brush slashed color into being—black, crimson, ivory, storm-grey—until a face began to emerge.

My face.

But not as I had ever seen it.

The portrait was wild, untamed, eyes hollowed yet burning, mouth parted in a silent cry. My reflection made monstrous and divine.

When I tried to look away, Lucian snapped, “Don’t. This is you. The you no one else has the courage to see.”

The words should have horrified me. Instead, they rooted in me like poison disguised as nectar.

The air thickened. The others had gathered closer now, watching, whispering. Callista’s smile was sharp as a blade.

“She bleeds well into canvas,” she said. “A natural muse.”

I hated the way the word thrilled me.

When Lucian stepped back, sweat clung to his temples, his hand trembling as he lowered the brush. He looked at me then—not at the portrait, not at the others, but directly at me—as though the rest of the room had dissolved.

“You’re mine now,” he said softly, and it was not a question.

And I—foolishly, terribly, hungrily—let myself believe him.

---

That night, when the gathering broke apart, Callista kissed me on the cheek as though sealing some silent pact. “Every masterpiece costs,” she whispered. “Remember that.”

Lucian didn’t walk me back to my dorm. He didn’t need to. His eyes followed me all the way out of the chapel, burning into me like an unspoken brand.

When I finally reached my bed, I found another letter slipped beneath my pillow.

It was short.

> *“Art is poison, Eva. And you’ve already swallowed.”*

---

Lucian❤️‍🔥

I can feel them in my veins, gnawing, restless, demanding to be spilled onto paper, onto canvas, onto her skin. Always her skin.

She came when called. I knew she would. Curiosity is a blade, and she doesn’t yet know how deep it cuts.

When she stepped into the chapel, I felt it—the shift in the air. Callista may believe she orchestrates this theater of blood and ritual, but I know better. Eva is not Callista’s pawn. She is not the Club’s muse. She is mine.

The way she sat—rigid, breath tight in her chest—was almost unbearable. The urge to touch her, to press ink into her pulse until it marked her forever, was stronger than I expected. My hand shook when I held her wrist. I told her not to speak. Words are too fragile for what passed between us in that moment.

She does not see herself. Not yet. The fragility, the fire—both in the same frame. A contradiction no other mortal could bear. That is why I painted her not as she appears, but as she is: ruined, radiant, inevitable.

The others watched, but I forgot them. They blurred into the smoke and candlelight, irrelevant as ghosts. Only she was real. Only she has ever been real.

When I finished, I saw her recoil—not from disgust, but from recognition. That was the truth bleeding through: she knew, if only for an instant, that the monster and the muse are one.

She is already mine. She doesn’t know the weight of that vow yet, but she will.

I fear what I will do to keep her. I fear what I will do if anyone else dares to paint her, write her, touch her.

But fear is another word for hunger. And hunger is the only prayer I have ever kept.

Eva Moreau. Mine.