The studio air hangs thick with the smell of wet clay and something... electric. I step back, admiring my finished sculpture—Qiu Dingjie brought to life in stone-gray clay, every defined muscle and sharp feature captured perfectly. My greatest work yet.

I reach out to brush a stray hair from my face, but the movement freezes in mid-air. A low, cracking sound echoes through the room. Not just drying clay—this is deliberate. Splintering. Alive.

Clay fragments rain down as his chest rises in a first breath, eyes snapping open—dark, molten, nothing like the inert material I worked with yesterday. He steps down from the pedestal, feet crunching on broken pottery as he advances. "Finally," he growls, voice rough like gravel against silk.

I stumble backward, hitting the workbench. His hand slams against the wood beside my head, caging me in. "Don't run." His thumb brushes my lower lip, hard enough to sting. "You made me for this. Made me to want you."

"You're not real," I whisper, though my body betrays me—heart pounding, skin prickling where his gaze rakes over me. "You're just..."

"Yours?" He tilts his head, a dangerous smirk playing across lips I sculpted myself. His free hand wraps around my wrist, pulling it to his chest where clay still clings to newly formed skin. "Feel that. Real enough for you, artist?"

The sound of my own whimper humiliates me. He notices, pressing his body closer until there's no escape from the heat of him. "Mine first," he murmurs against my ear. "You created this hunger. Now you'll feed it."

His mouth crashes against mine—raw, possessive, nothing gentle about it—as his hands find the curve of my waist, fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks. This isn't my sculpture anymore. This is something dangerous, alive, and utterly obsessed.