Page 2 of Shadow Secrets
Do something that has nothing to do with this building.
The lynx sketch was in the glove compartment box where he’d put it three weeks ago. It was rough, nothing fancy, just the lines of the cat in profile with the geometry he wanted woven through the negative space. His callsign was the one thing the SPS team had given him that actually fit.
Dom Salazar at Iron Rose had mentioned an artist who did fine-line work with hidden symbolism. He said she was talented and a little prickly, but worth it. Sebastian had filed it away and done nothing about it, just as he did with most things that weren’t operational.
Today, though. Today, he had an empty afternoon and a direct order to fill it.
He pulled out the sketch, looked at it for a moment, then tucked it into his jacket pocket and started the engine.
The road from the compound to Blackridge wound through country that looked like God had gotten ambitious and then walked away mid-project—big sky, bigger mountains, the kind of emptiness that could swallow a man whole. Sebastian drove with the window cracked, October air sharp enough to taste, and let the radio fill the silence because silence was bad.
He landed on a country station and a song he didn’t know. Fine.
The song ended and the DJ’s voice cut in, bright and conversational, making everything sound like a lead-in to a mattress commercial.
“—remembering today as the anniversary of the assassination attempt on Virginia Galbraith, daughter of former Vice President Harold Galbraith. It’s been six years since Secret Service Agent Sebastian Whitaker made headlines when he?—”
He killed the radio.
The silence he’d been avoiding filled the cab. His jaw ached. He realized he was clenching it and forced himself to stop. His grip on the steering wheel had gone white-knuckled and he forced that to ease too. Muscle by muscle, conscious control, the way they’d trained him. Regulate the body and the mind follows.
Six years.
He didn’t think about the fundraiser. He didn’t think about the weight of Ginger as he shoved her to the floor, or the sound she made. Not the way the bullet hit him like a baseball bat swung by a god. He didn’t think about lying on Italian marble in a room full of screaming people, his hand pressed to his side, blood hot between his fingers, watching a twenty-seven-year-old man die three feet away because Sebastian had put two rounds in his chest as he’d shielded Ginger.
He’d done his job, but he forced the images and sensations away, pressing his foot harder into the gas pedal.
Iron Rose Tattoo sat on a block in Blackridge’s industrial district that looked like it had given up on itself sometime around a decade ago. A pawn shop flanked one side, a check-cashing place on the other, and at the end of the street, a laundromat with a hand-lettered sign advertising a broken dryer. Bars on the windows. A neon sign above the door read IRON ROS TATTOO because the “e” had burned out and nobody had replaced it.
Sebastian parked and assessed the block out of habit. A couple of guys were smoking outside the pawn shop. A woman pushed a stroller with a quick stride of someone who didn’t stop moving in this neighborhood. Nobody pinged his threat radar, but the radar was always on.
That was the problem.
The parlor didn’t look like much from the outside, but CB had told him Dom Salazar was former Navy, did old-school traditional work, and was the kind of guy who’d earned every line on his face. More importantly, he respected the ones on other people’s. That’s why so many in CB’s motorcycle club came here. And while Dom had told Sebastian animals weren’t his specialty, his young tattoo artist had a flair for them.
Sebastian touched the sketch in his jacket pocket, felt the edges of the paper against his fingers, and got out of the truck.
The bell above the door jangled when he pushed it open. The parlor was small, clean, and better than the exterior suggested. Flash art covered one wall in neat rows—traditional stuff, roses and skulls and anchors, the bread and butter of any shop.
But the opposite wall was different. Custom work, framed and lit. Fantasy pieces—a dragon coiled through cathedral ruins, a woman in armor standing at the edge of a cliff, an enchanted forest rendered in a linework style so precise it looked like engraving. Someone in this shop had serious talent.
A woman stood behind the counter with her back to him, organizing ink bottles on a shelf. Her shoulder-length brown hair was loose. A vintage band tee—Fleetwood Mac, the Rumours tour—was tucked into high-waisted jeans. Ink was visible on both forearms, stylized florals winding from wrist to elbow.
She moved slowly as if she’d already had a long day and was counting the hours until it was over. “Be right with you,” she said without enthusiasm. She didn’t even turn around.
This must be the young artist. “No rush.”
She froze, then slowly pivoted. Her brown eyes were big and expressive, taking him in with one sweep from head to toe. She blinked, and every drop of color drained from her face in the span of a single heartbeat.
She knew who he was.
There was a specific sequence—recognition, surprise, then the recalibration as people matched the face in front of them with the one they’d seen on magazine covers and cable news.
That one photograph wouldn’t die, the one of him on the stretcher with blood on his dress shirt. Most people landed on excitement, or awe, or that weird hunger that famous people learned to recognize and dread.
She didn’t land on any of those. She landed on something cold and sharp. His threat assessment lit up before his conscious mind caught up to it.
Then he saw the artist’s name printed in clean block letters beneath the custom work he’d been admiring.
