Does 'Close To The Knives' Include Visual Art By Wojnarowicz?

Dmitri Volkov is the heir to one of New York’s most ruthless Russian mafia families—cold, controlled, and carrying scars no one is allowed to see. He has spent his life obeying blood oaths and burying every part of himself that doesn’t serve the syndicate. Love, especially love for a man, is a weakness he cannot afford. Ethan Moreau is a twenty-two-year-old French art student on scholarship at NYU—soft-spoken, openly gay, and painfully trusting. He came to New York to chase beauty in a city full of sharp edges, never expecting one of those edges to look back at him with ice-blue eyes. Their worlds collide by chance in Central Park. A fleeting encounter becomes stolen nights, desperate kisses in shadowed alleys, and whispered promises neither of them can keep. For Ethan, Dmitri is intensity and danger wrapped in tenderness he’s never known. For Dmitri, Ethan is the first crack of light in a life built on darkness—and the one thing that could destroy everything he’s been raised to protect. But secrets have weight. Dmitri’s family is closing in, a rival syndicate is circling, and every touch between them pulls the noose tighter. Misunderstandings fester into silence, jealousy into rage, and love into something that hurts to hold. When blood finally stains the canvas of their fragile world, Ethan will have to decide if he can love a man who was born to break hearts—and Dmitri will have to choose between the family that raised him and the only person who ever made him want to be free. In a city that devours the innocent, their story is a slow bleed of devotion, betrayal, and the kind of love that can ruin you completely.

Katherine Salazar. A girl from Spain whose life changed the day she first held a knife. She learned early that silence can be sharper than any blade. Her weapon a slender knife, always hidden beneath her clothes. Her adopted parents named her "Ghost Knife". She moved like a shadow—silent, precise, deliberate, clean. As she grew into a woman, her beauty captivated—and haunted— people around her in ways almost impossible to resist. When she took a mission she wasn’t supposed to handle herself, it tore her world apart, everything changed. She was caught by two brutal twin—opposites in behavior, different in power, identical in blood. Instead of ending her life, they chose to use her skills for their own dirty work. But then things got complicated. When both twin fell in love with her. A forbidden love, dangerous and consuming. Her next mission was supposed to be simple: eliminate the twins’ greatest enemy. But the target… was her “dead” father. "Dad?” My voice barely escaped, thick with disbelief, my vision blurred by unshed tears. “Kat?" His voice trembled with shock, more startled than I had ever seen him. In a fluid motion, he lifted his left hand, swift, precise—and the guards froze, stopped as if caught in a web of unseen power. " Y..You , I saw..." My words faltered, the knife quivering in my grip.

After my sister's appendectomy left her without both kidneys, I took a scalpel and held an entire hospital hostage. I locked twelve doctors and three patients in the morgue, announcing to the world they'd all been infected with HIV. With only three hours until the treatment window closed, the doctors, trembling and begging, swore that they knew nothing. I started a live stream, flashing a blood-stained scalpel. "You have three hours to find my sister's kidneys." I didn't care if they were already inside someone else.

In an East London lock up, two film makers, Jimmy and Sam, are duct taped to chairs and forced to watch a snuff film by Ashkan, a loan shark to whom they owe a lot of money. If they don’t pay up, they’ll be starring in the next one. Before the film reaches its end, Ashkan and all his men are slaughtered by unknown assailants. Only Jimmy and Sam survive the massacre, leaving them with the sole copy of the snuff film. The film makers decide to build their next movie around the brutal film. While auditioning actors, they stumble upon Melissa, an enigmatic actress who seems perfect for the leading role, not least because she’s the spitting image of the snuff film’s main victim. Neither the film, nor Melissa, are entirely what they seem however. Jimmy and Sam find themselves pulled into a paranormal mystery that leads them through the shadowy streets of the city beneath the city and sees them re-enacting an ancient Mesopotamian myth cycle. As they play out the roles of long forgotten gods and goddesses, they’re drawn into the subtle web of a deadly heresy that stretches from the beginnings of civilization to the end of the world as we know it. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

While cleaning the house, I noticed my box of new razor blades had been opened. Without hesitation, I had my lawyer draft a divorce agreement and send it to my wife, Rachel Jackman. She called me right away. "Are you kicking up a fuss again? What is it this time?" I fought to keep my emotions under control and said, "One of the razor blades in the drawer is missing."

A civil war is on the verge of erupting in the western part of Africa, Nigeria. Two boys are lost in the shadow of the war and must make their way out of the dark shadows. No matter what it takes.