My Violent Muse

by Rosie Sycamore

Genres: Thrillers; Vigilante Thrillers

Synopsis

Would you still love me if I were a murderer…?
 
Morello is a nobody: a homeless orphan and starving artist with nothing but impossible dreams of escaping obscurity. Then Florence appears—dazzling, dangerous, and offering Morello a way out, on one chilling condition: each year, they must hunt and kill one of the art world’s predatory men. In return, Morello will inherit a life of privilege and promise.
 
Together, they transform revenge into twisted performance art, staging each murder with meticulous, theatrical flair. But when Morello falls for Jude, a wealthy art student who offers her a glimpse of a life sans murder, her carefully curated reality begins to unravel—and she’s one lie away from losing everything she’s killed for. With the body count rising and anonymous threats closing in, Morello must finally ask herself: is the cost of vengeance ever truly paid? And after a life shaped by violence and manipulation, will she ever become the artist of her own fate, or remain forever someone else’s muse?
 
Compulsive and deviant, My Violent Muse is a razor-sharp thriller about revenge, exploitation, obsession, and the dangerous bargains we strike for power, survival, and love.
 

Release date: September 29, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

ISN’T IT A BIT SEXY TO BE THINKING ABOUT YOUR FIANCÉ RAILING YOU WHEN you’re elbows deep in some guy who you know, way down to the pits, has done awful things and will continue to do awful things unless you do something about it?

Slick with the blood of a man all up and down my arms, and all I’m thinking is, God, I’m meant to be making a baby with my fiancé right now. Is that bad? To end and create a life in one night? Macabre, perhaps. So, so wrong. But it’s a bit sexy, too, or is that just me? If this guy didn’t make such a fuss between Florence slinging a ribbon around his neck and me gutting his heart, I could have made it home, showered and full of adrenaline, just in time to make a new life by tomorrow, easy. But it’s ten minutes to midnight, and Paul Warren, our million-dollar-smile trophy hunter and victim of the year, is taking his sweet time to die.

The hardest part, if I’m honest, is how much I wish I could say to Jude, beautiful absolute-sex Jude waiting for me at home, Look, look what I’ve done, aren’t I good? I’ve scrubbed a single speck clean on the mirror that is life and all of the people in it. I’ve flicked back a dent. The world is a better place now because a bad person is no longer in it, and I did that. There’s just something really hot about knowing things about people and having the choice to ruin them over it. But he has no idea. No one does, except Florence.

This is the deal she gave me: I do the kill, Florence cleans it up. Let’s just keep it simple and say between cleaning it up and making some good money, there’s something a little unhinged involved. I don’t want to lose you, I know how murder seems to drive an ice pick between friends, and I don’t want you to think we’re killing people unnecessarily. I swear, every last breath I witness is entirely warranted and necessary. And besides, we’re killing scoundrels, absolute deplorables. The kind of men who paint beautiful women and sell the artwork to exclusive galleries, only to drug their muse in a hotel room later. The kind of men who render cutting an animal open performative and charge spectators to watch. These are men who choose to exploit others’ bodies and lives for their own profit. Because exploitation, ugh, it’s so aesthetic. Don’t cry, it’s a work of art!

Florence and I, we’re ridding the world of these men, one kill at a time.

Are you on board?

(Please, say yes. The love of my life is waiting for me.)

FLORENCE INTRODUCED HERSELF TO ME FOUR YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS twenty-two and she was twenty-seven. I was just a baby, and twenty-seven seemed geriatric. I was on the street (literally, concrete chilling me through the bone and seeping into the marrow). I had been sitting on the steps of an art refuge, swirling dirty water around an eight-day-old paper cup as if it were expensive wine, when the shadow of Florence loomed over me and her dulcet voice offered to buy me a coffee.

I looked up at her, the blinding sun casting the shape of her black (even her shadow looked expensive), and I said to her, “Do I look like I need one?”

I’ll never forget the sound of her laugh. Like I was the funniest person alive, like I might drown in her pity, like she wanted to swaddle me up like the last baby on earth. All of those things somehow at once, in that brief laugh. But no one had ever offered to buy me a coffee before! I’d paid for my own coffee, the first I’d had in that cup, eight days prior with four dollars fifty in coins. I’d spent a stupid amount of time debating what I should spend the coins on. It was the dregs of a lush sum I’d banked selling a single painting hung on a gallery wall space, granted as charity by a local curator when I was fourteen. Rudderless—A Step Inside the Gaze of Street Wealth is what she’d called it. A bit gross, really, the romanticized voyeurism, considering myself and the few other contenders were cheap homeless curbside urchins. I’d painted the piece inside the community-funded art refuge, offered as a safe space to those less fortunate and a haven for fostering artistic potential. I found it soon after I ran from my home, and it became a decade-long love affair and codependence. The floors were cracked and dirty, and the volunteers spoke to us like we were toddlers, but that refuge was the one place I could go to act like I wasn’t actually homeless (that is, until they’d pull the blinds at night and tell everyone to go home). From sitting on the concrete steps at the crack of dawn until we were tossed out at blinds-down in the evening, that place functioned as the stepping-stone across the chasm of destitution to success. It was where I could pretend I was privileged enough to spend my time creating art instead of finding food, or scouting out shelters, or staring at the skin on my arm and wondering whether I was tanning or just more grimy than the day before. Or, god, imagine being able to not only create art for pleasure in place of need, but to actually use real money to grant myself a place in an institution that would gift me a piece of paper at the end of it all to signify, You Are a Real Artist. To actually Make It as an artist from my crib of poverty seemed utterly Dionysian (and oh, to be educated enough to even know the word!). To put it plainly, art and becoming an artist was my existential cornucopia. I’d completed a portfolio’s worth of pictures in that place, but because I had no home to take them to and my complimentary locker at the refuge was already full, a lot of them ended up in the bin. One of the scariest days of my life was when I was almost kicked out of the refuge for stealing expensive brushes and selling them on the street. I wish I could say I never tried it again, but I did—they just didn’t catch me like they did the first time.

The painting I sold at the Rudderless exhibition went to an anonymous billionaire, hence the said slab of money (all cash!). They bought it within the first hour of the show. Now that was something. For baby fourteen-year-old me, that sale was my name in lights, it was not only a chance to step beyond the art refuge but a ticket into the stratosphere of achievement. Shortly after the sale, the billionaire offered me a two-week-long stay at his so-called private artists’ retreat. Obviously, I said yes. I wouldn’t say it was the worst decision of my life, but looking back on it now, take this from me: if a billionaire is offering you something too good to be true, don’t fucking take it.

Contrary to my hopes of stratospheric success, following the private artists’ retreat, I wound up right back on the street and glued to the steps of the refuge. This time, though, I had a slab of money. And what did I spend the money on?

If I could have bought a house, I would have (laughable, really, to even consider being able to afford that). A car would have been nice, too. I guess a tent would have been sensible. Can you buy a boyfriend? I’d never had one of those. I suppose in a loop-de-loop kind of way I could buy a boyfriend via buying a house and a car and some nice clothes. Buy a life, so to speak. A reason to live. But you can’t buy love. And I knew that only because Gatsby tried and failed to buy Daisy’s love, and it’s the only piece of literature I ever had the chance to read during the years I spent discarded on the streets, and so I’ve read it a million times. But like I said, if I could essentially buy a life, I would have. And I’d have made that life rich and met Daisy before she met Tom and I’d have held onto that love and never given her the chance to see that money is made of nothing but paper and dreams.

But no, over the years following that private artists’ retreat, I spent the cash on food and stupid little bits of jewelry and way too many bottles of sparkling water (I bet you’ve never even thought about how hard it is to find good clean water when you don’t have a house). Oh, and I spent too much of it on an evening gown that was way too long for me and made me feel like I didn’t really live on the street, I was just on my way somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and important. It was the first thing I bought, actually. And I wore that dress every day, along with my mother’s ushanka, until I found somewhere to wash them both, and then I wore it some more. I wore it to death.

And the last four dollars and fifty cents? I’d been dangerously close to spending it on two packets of lime sherbet, the powdered kind with the flimsy little plastic spoon, because somewhere in the quagmire of my brain, lime sherbet was the flavor of my last happy memory. I took a risk on it and hoped the first coffee I’d ever bought myself would surpass the lime sherbet dream and become my new happiest memory. Real independence, paying my way. It wasn’t. I burned my tongue on the first sip.

“I’ll even get you a new cup,” Florence said. “A glass one, something that’ll last.” And then she added, “Perhaps I’ll buy you a new hat, too. That one looks like it’s been chewed up and spat right out of the bowels of hell.”

I still couldn’t make out her face. She smelled like coconut; it seemed a luxury to me to smell of anything but city grease. I pulled the ushanka off my head and sniffed it. She was right, it smelled like hell. Worse, actually. I tilted my gaze upward and said to the void, “I’m trying to make my new happiest memory.”

“With a coffee?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t stood up yet to see her, she also hadn’t knelt down. The shade of her body was a relief from the heat.

“How long have you been trying?”

“Years,” I said.

She slipped off a pair of soft leather gloves one by one and finally offered her hand. It looked expensive. Long, glossy, barely-lilac-colored nails with rich plum tips, the kind of hand that could have its own career. Hers was the hand of divinity, emerging from a black cloud. That’s when she told me her name: Florence. Prosperity, personified.

“I will change your life,” she said. “Come. Give me one night.”

I touched my hand to hers. How could I say no to that?

Florence bought me that coffee in the glass cup without asking me what kind I wanted. What I really wanted was a cup cluttered full of ice cubes. Would you like some coffee with those ice cubes? level of clutter. I wanted to crunch them and swallow the shards and feel them chilling my insides. Like it might wash me clean from the inside out. Florence handed me the coffee in the glass cup, black and inky and burning, and she said to me, “The milk they use is no good. You don’t want it.”

I was dancing the hot glass between my grimy fingertips when we were already out the door of the coffee shop and trundling along the street. She was brisk, even in heels. Little black leather heels with a buckle, high enough to be classy, low enough to be sensible. She was dressed like she’d tumbled out of an old photograph. I could barely keep up with her.

“What if I do?”

She glanced back and pinned her eyes on me. “You don’t.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s not fresh.”

“Is milk ever fresh?”

It was a distinction that had been bled out of me by the city buildings and the smog. Milk came from bottles. Milk was a product. The bodily source seemed ludicrous.

She asked me, “Have you ever tried a woman’s breast milk?”

“As a baby?”

“Not necessarily.”

“That’s disgusting.”

She shrugged, but kept her pace. “No more so than a cow.”

“Have you?”

“Of course.” She turned back and smiled at me. It was the first time she’d smiled directly at me. Her pearly teeth against deep red lips was stark.

“How?”

“With a wineglass.”

Before I could say any more, she added, “It’s sickly, in an opulent kind of way. Induces a sweet kind of drunkenness. Very intimate, very luxurious. Literally, I want to drink you up.” She kept her eyes on me when she said this, and she looped her arm through mine. I couldn’t tell if she meant she wanted to drink me up, specifically. I liked hearing her say it. I wanted her to keep speaking to me like that.

“Where are we going?” I asked. I sipped the coffee she bought me. It tasted like burnt dirty water. Perhaps it would be sweeter with breast milk.

Where her arm was coiled inside mine, she held her other hand to my forearm and traced her gloved fingertips gently against my skin. “I’m having a party tonight,” she said, and she leaned in close to my neck. “I want you to come.”

“I don’t know who you are.”

“So? I’m inviting you.”

“Why are you inviting me?”

“What else are you going to do?”

Sit on the pavement, snatch food remnants from discarded containers, go on a hunt for coins. I shrugged. It was embarrassing. I didn’t want to say anything about my life to someone who looked like Florence.

“I have something important I need help with,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I want you to help me make some art.”

“At the party?”

She nodded and then tipped her chin toward the distance ahead of us. “In that big house on the hill.”

A grand sad house loomed ahead. It sat amongst the only trees in the city. I knew that house. I knew every crack in the timber, I knew every trapdoor and secret room. It had been ransacked and abused like a beautiful woman left to die in the mud. Once upon a time, when its walls were hot with electricity like blood in the body, a man and a woman lived there with their only daughter, until a deal went sour and they were raided and the girl was the abandoned casualty.

“That’s where we’re going?”

She nodded.

“But why are you inviting me?” I asked again.

“I told you, I want you to help me,” she said. “Haven’t you ever heard of saying yes to opportunities?”

I shrugged.

“Let me guess your name,” she said.

“You’ll never get it.”

“Ma cherie,” she said, “like Cherie Currie,” and I stared at the side of her face.

“Do I know you?” I asked her.

“It’s those rosy cheeks and those don’t-fuck-with-me eyes.” She smiled. “I’m close, aren’t I? Go on, tell me.”

“Morello,” I said.

Florence sighed. “Morello.” She gave me a heavy look, as heavy and round as my name in her mouth.

“But how did you—”

“Tell me what you want in life,” she interrupted me. “Tell me the one thing you want the most.”

There were a lot of things. I said, “I want the Big D.”

She raised her eyebrows at me, and I added, “I want to go to art school. The Big D, the piece of paper. I want a degree.”

She nodded. “You know, I’ve seen your eyes glued to gallery windows. I’ve seen how much time you spend at that little refuge. I saw the picture you sold. You want to be an artist.”

I’d thought about it many times: if I was normal, if I had parents who loved me and a house to live in, a school to hate and homework to cry over, I’d graduate and go to art school and I’d waste my money and live amongst people who were born to burn time and create things.

“But I know how hard it is to make it without money,” she said. “That art refuge isn’t going to get you where you want to go.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you need to know the right people,” she said. “And the right people are not spending time in places like that.”

“Why were you there, then? On the steps?”

“I was scouting,” she said. “I need an assistant, and you’re talented. I’ve seen your pictures. If you help me, I’ll help you.”

“So you’ve been watching me?”

“You caught my eye. Or maybe I just know a well-made ushanka when I see one,” she said. She reached out to touch it reflexively, then pulled back. “Well, once upon a time. Is it possum?”

“Chinchilla,” I said. “It was my mother’s.”

“You loved her?”

“Not really,” I said. “But the chinchillas were my pets. I think my mother skinned them.”

“I think you need to get rid of it.”

“But they were my pets,” I said again.

“Such emotional attachments offer you nothing.” She picked at the ushanka with her gloved fingertips and tossed it from my head onto the pavement. “Except perhaps a foul memento of loss.”

I stopped and stared at the ushanka lying on the pavement. It looked like a dead animal, not just dead, but half-rotted. I wanted to pick it up but Florence nudged me forward to keep walking.

“There’s better things for you,” she said.

I looked at her, and I let her push me forward. I asked her, “What is this art thing you’re making?”

“Not telling,” she said. “Yet. It’s going to be huge. I’m going to rupture the fabric of the art world.”

“How? If you have no money—”

“I never said I don’t have money,” she said. “Think Gatsby, but with sex rather than alcohol.”

“I don’t understand.”

She gave me a look, something akin to pity. “Being rich is all about who you talk to. Looking rich is all about how you spend it. I mean, you already understand it, look at you with that grotty little ushanka. You know how to make yourself look rich.”

“It’s not real, though. I don’t have anything.”

“Well,” she said, “for me it is. I wanted to make money, and so I looked between the lines and made some smart choices.”

In other words, above all else, Florence was telling me she knew how to lie.

She added, “And now, I’m giving you the same opportunity.”

I asked her, for the umpteenth time, “But why me?”

“Why not you, Morello? Why can’t it be you, this time?”

When Florence said that she may as well have said the moon shines just for me. It triggered a dopey smile in me I didn’t mean to give. It put a cartoonish little twinkle in my eye and scribbled pink crayon over my cheeks. She made it seem like I had some unique, inherent quality that was just right for this exact moment, like she’d studied me and countless others, looking for her Goldilocks assistant and that, against boundless odds, I was she. Limbs crunched up on the pavement, unwashed and uncaring, eyes downcast at the same angle day to night, week to week. Somehow, I was made to do whatever it was she needed that night. The purpose of it warmed me—it wasn’t a feeling I’d ever experienced before. This must be what priests feel like, I thought, but better.

“That is, unless you have something better to do,” she added.

I stopped myself from bursting forth and saying, Obviously there’s nothing better I could be doing! Because although that was true, it seemed a little hopeless to reveal the extent of my loose tether to society to a woman like Florence. Really, I had no reason not to be arm in arm with Florence walking up the hill toward that lonely house. That was the kind of life I knew; nothing to lose, an entire world to gain.

“Okay,” I said. I tried to hide my smile. “I want to help you.”

“Well then.” She squeezed my arm. “Welcome to the last supper.”

“The last supper?”

“Yes,” she said. “You know, Da Vinci? Jesus and his cronies? We’re going to recreate it.”

“Is that your big art installation?”

“It’s part of it,” she said. She stopped walking then, and with her hand still wrapped around my arm, she looked at me with this jubilant glitter in her eyes. “Think about it, that image. A bunch of people sitting around a table, and one of them says, I’m about to die, and then he makes eye contact with each and every single one of them and he says, Because one of you is going to betray me. It’s so fucking lush.” Her grip stayed on my arm, and she pulled me to keep walking.

“If I was a Jesus girl,” she added, “I might say we’re about to cleanse the world of sin.”

If I look back on it, from that moment, I suppose being liked by Florence was consuming. Or, truly, the desire to be liked by Florence. In all of the time that I’ve known her, it was never clear whether that desire was consummated, but that didn’t seem to matter. All you needed was to feel liked by her. Feeling liked by her felt good. The best. Or, god, to feel loved by her. I’d bottle it if I could.

FLORENCE WAS BLOCKING THE FRONT DOOR OF HER HOUSE, LOOKING AT ME like I owed her. Blood smeared the floor between us, Paul Warren’s headless body the tip of the gory trail. It was finally almost time to go home to my fiancé, but I was still holding the knife.

“I’m done,” I said. I tossed the knife and it thudded from Paul Warren’s chest to the floor. His blood smeared my hands, too, and I thought, What an intimate thing to be drenched in the blood of another person.

“I’m not doing this again,” I added, firmer this time. “He’s the last one.” I peered at Florence. She looked the same as ever; glossy rich lips, eyes bracing for a challenge, immaculate figure. Despite pouncing on Paul Warren like a spider catching her lunch only moments ago, she looked untouched by murder, somehow. Ludicrous, compared to me. If the police walked in right that minute, I’d be toast. But she looked perfect. That’s one of the things about Florence—she never ages. It’s like the entire year between now and the last time I stood in her hall with a limp body adjacent to mine, and every year before that, she’d been suspended in gel—skin ever supple and fair, blonde hair kept in place, perpetual “new clothes” feeling. It’s like a year of mine was five minutes of hers.

“You’re just tired,” she said.

“I’m not—”

“No, I guess you’re just fucking delusional, then.”

We stared each other down for a moment, until she said, “Don’t be stupid, Morello. You’re not stupid, are you?”

I drew a deep breath and looked down at my bloody hands. Sometimes I wondered if the blood was so thickly seeped into the crevices of my fingerprints that it could never, truly, be washed away.

I said, “At least just give me some drug to help me forget what we just did.”

“That risks both of us,” she said. “You could trip up and say something. A mid-coitus Freudian slip.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “It would ruin my life.”

“Our lives.”

“You have to trust me.”

She knew that, I could see that she knew that. It started the minute she’d found me on the pavement four years ago. She reached her hand to mine. “I’ve missed you.”

“We’re codependent,” I said.

She burst into a smile. It was childlike, the way it transformed her face. A spritzy, warm kind of smile. It was a smile that was easy to love. She tugged on my blood-crusted hand. “Just stay a little longer.”

I ripped off my jacket (a cheap clear rain jacket from a two-dollar store, it’s my go-to murder outfit) and tossed it on the floor. I followed Florence and sat beside her on the lounge. My limbs were tired. Seeing Paul Warren splashed all over Florence’s foyer, I felt suddenly hyperaware of the gallons of blood inside my own body. The sheer volume of it was weighing me down. I thought, What a burden it is to be alive.

I waited for her to speak first.

“Well,” she said finally, “aren’t you happy?”

“Happy?”

She nodded toward Paul Warren. “He was yours.”

“No he wasn’t.”

“He was,” she said, and she started to smile again. “It’s obvious, by how knee-deep you were in him just now,” she said. “Don’t you remember? You told me about him. You read about him in the news.”

“He was cheating on his wife,” I said. “And all the sexual assault charges.”

“Morello.” She gave me a look, some kind of pity. “You were specifically upset about his trophy hunting. That he strapped some bear carcass to his car, and that he killed a lion to bring it home in his private jet so he could show it off in his museum.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he’s mine.”

“You specifically said to me, Since when is art above law? And I thought, exactly right. We should do something about that.”

“I was just venting.”

“And I’m just enacting divine justice.”

“I didn’t think you’d actually—”

“What? Listen to you?” Her eyes softened on me. “Believe it or not, I actually care about you. I value your opinion. Besides, it’s the same as last year. He was yours, too.”

“Can we not do this now?” I said. “Please.” My head dropped into my crusty hands. “I’m just so tired. I want to go home, I want to see Jude. I’m so sick of”—I nodded toward Paul Warren—“that.”

“We have a deal,” Florence said.

“I know.”

“Keep in mind,” she said, “your home, your boyfriend—”

“Fiancé.”

“That guy,” she said, “that you think you like. I gave you all of that, and I can take it away.”

I wanted to fall onto the lounge and melt into it. Florence was watching me closely, I could feel her eyes on me.

She drew a deep breath and leaned back on the lounge. “How is university?”

I stared at Paul Warren behind Florence. His body was splayed beneath a large window that overlooked a mess of dense trees, and beyond that, a glimmer of an ocean view (this proximity to the beach was a gash in my side because, despite being beautiful and adding dollars to her house, it meant I not only had to regularly wash blood off my hands, but sand as well). Florence’s house was very secluded, she made sure of it.

“You should close that blind,” I said. It was dark out there but anyone trudging through the trees could easily be treated to a real-life horror movie. “Study is going well,” I added. Isn’t it wild, to be making small talk in a moment like this? “The grad show is next week. I have to present a final art piece.”

Florence made her way over to the window, closed the blinds, and then sat back down closer to me than before. She asked, “What are you doing for it?”

Despite some depraved corner of sympathy in my mind searching for the miraculous, Paul Warren still hadn’t moved. In my peripheral I saw Florence’s eyes still latched onto mine. Even with the blood crusting on my hands, her fingers were locked into my fingers. Her knees were pressed into my legs. Every touch from Florence was deliberate. Her touch was a rare thing, made more powerful by her knowing how much it affected me and how little control I had over it. And even beneath her touch, she was good at pretending like I meant nothing to her. But if I meant nothing, I wouldn’t be here at all.

“Some kind of art-imitates-life thing,” I said.

“Oh.”

I stared at Paul Warren’s ribboned chest. “I feel very inspired by you.”

“In what sense?”

I finally switched to look at her. “Female rage, and its intersection with art.”

Her eyes lingered on mine for a moment too long, and then she said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I forced myself to hold her stare. “I do.”

“Am I invited to the exhibition?”

“Of course,” I said. “You’re the reason I’m doing it at all.”
. . .