Page 112 of The Villain We Tempt

I don’t. But I think that might have more to do with the fact that telling her about The Ghost Prince would mean I'd have to tell her about Velvet Villainess, not so much me not wanting to wake her up.

In the bathroom between our rooms, I start the shower and brush my teeth while I wait for the water to heat up. Then I pause, frowning as I look at my nails.

…They're black.

Underneathmy nails is black, that is.

I spit out my toothpaste, then use a cleaner to scrape underneath the nail. I hold the gunk up to the light, peering closer.

Is that…paint?

The gunk falls from the cleaner onto the sink. Where it lands on water droplets, black starts torundown the porcelain slope of the sink in streaks.

My brow furrows.

Itispaint. But it’s not like I was creating a masterpiece earlier. So when the hell did I get black paint under my?—

Whoa.

I turn the shower off and bolt into my room, sitting down at my desk and quickly opening my laptop to do a search on “temporary tattoos”.

I now very vividly remember what I was scraping with my nails earlier.

…It was The Ghost Prince’sbody.

I dug my nails into his hips when he was thrusting between my thighs, and scraped them over his skin.

And now there’s black paint under there.

I stare at the search result.

Temporary tattoos are typically made of water-permeable paper, cosmetic-grade FDA-approved colorants and pigments, a thin water-soluble release film (such as polyvinyl alcohol or gelatin), and a skin-safe, hypoallergenic acrylic-based adhesive.

A slithering sensation coils in my chest as I quickly bring up The Ghost Prince’s page on my laptop and click on a random video. When he’s mid-dance, I pause the video at a point where he’s got both muscled arms raised and his chiseled abs flexed, and take a screenshot.

I do the same thing with four more videos of his: one from just a few weeks ago, another from three months back, and two from last spring. Then I open all the screenshots of his bare torso and compare them.

At first, I think I might be crazy. But then I see it, like those puzzles in kids' magazines that ask you to find the subtle differences.

I just spotted one.

On the surface, in every screenshot, The Ghost Prince looks the same. Same mask. Same low-slung pants. Same bare, tattooed torso and muscled arms. My eyes trace over the tattoo of the raven swooping down one side of his torso over his ribs and onto the groove of his left hip. Then my gaze shifts to the coiled snake rippling down his right side.

I know these tattoos. I’ve seen them up close. Tonight, I raked my nails over them as I came for him.

But the devil, as they say, is in the details.

In four of the screen grabs, The Ghost Prince looks identical. But in the fifth one, from three months ago, he doesn't.

…The snake is flipped.

Inallhis other videos, the all-black, highly detailed tattoo of the snake coils down his ribs with the snake’s head and forked tongue curving down toward his waistband, like it’s pointing right at his dick. But in this one video, the head is facing the other way.

My pulse skips.

It’snot a real tattoo.

I spend the next hour taking screenshots of The Ghost Prince’s videos, comparing his ink. His arms arereallyhard to track, because they’re covered in layers of it, like maybe he had new tattoos done over previous ones. But after a while I’m pretty certain the “Ride fast, live hard” tattoo on his left pec and the skull on the right one are both fake.