She was invisible. He saw everything. Lyra Vance has spent twenty-three years perfecting the art of disappearing. No career worth mentioning. No relationships worth keeping. No one in the world who would notice if she stopped showing up tomorrow. Then Julian Cross looks at her across a crowded gallery — and doesn't look away. He's a reclusive, brilliant sculptor crippled by a creative block that's lasted months. She's the exact face he's been searching for. The offer is simple: three months as his live-in muse at a decommissioned lighthouse on the Oregon coast. The money is life-changing. The isolation is absolute. She says yes because she has nothing to lose. She's wrong. Inside the lighthouse, Julian strips away everything — her phone, her mirrors, her clothes, her sense of time. He poses her for hours in freezing silence, pushing her body past the point of failure, carving her agony into clay. His approval becomes her only source of warmth. His attention becomes the only proof she exists. And his hands — rough, clay-stained, exacting — become the only language her body understands. But Julian isn't just sculpting a masterpiece. He's sculpting her. And somewhere between the exhaustion and the ecstasy, between the pain of holding still and the devastation of being truly seen for the first time in her life, Lyra stops knowing where the art ends and the obsession begins — or whether she wants it to end at all. PAINTED IN AGONY is a standalone dark psychological romance featuring an obsessive, morally black artist hero, extreme power dynamics, isolation, captive themes, praise and degradation kink, and intensely explicit content. There is no rescue in these pages. Reader discretion is strongly advised.