Page 24 of Shadow Secrets
He’d said it because it was true. Because he’d killed Penn Crenshaw, and the least he could do was protect what was left of the man for the sister who still loved him.
He didn’t examine the other reason. The one that had to do with the look on Sutton’s face when she held those sketchbooks—the fierceness of it, the grief, the absolute refusal to surrender one more piece of herself to forces beyond her control. He’d found it hard to breathe for a second, watching her. That wasn’t professional. That wasn’t operational.
It was flat-out dangerous.
CHAPTER SIX
Sutton
Penn’s handwriting had always been terrible.
That was the first thing Sutton thought when she opened the first sketchbook in the tech room, Jasper’s scanner humming beside her. Claire and the team were arrayed around the table like surgeons waiting for the first incision.
Penn’s penmanship had been a running joke in the Crenshaw household—their mother called it seismographic, their father called it lazy. Penn called it artistic intention.
Nobody else in this room could read it. Sutton could.
She turned the first page. Jasper scanned it—the high-resolution camera capturing every mark, every smudge. Sutton studied the design underneath, a custom piece Penn had done for a client. Geometric linework, clean execution. Nothing unusual.
She turned another page. It was scanned. Another. The room was quiet except for the click of the scanner and the scratch of Claire’s pen on her notepad. Sebastian stood against the wall behind Sutton’s chair, close enough that she could feel his presence without turning around.
The first sketchbook held nothing beyond standard client work. Beautiful work—Penn had been gifted, no matter what else he’d been—but nothing that connected to Ginger’s claims or Claire’s Inkwell file.
The second sketchbook was different. Sutton saw it on the fourth page. The lines were familiar—the same design Ginger had shown her on the phone in the parlor, the tattoo she’d recognized instantly as Penn’s linework.
But these designs weren’t the finished version. They were earlier drafts. Iteration after iteration of Penn refining the overall design and adding layers.
“This is it.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “This is similar to the tattoo Ginger showed me.”
Claire leaned over. Sebastian moved closer.
“Walk us through it,” Claire said.
Sutton traced the design with her fingertip, following the lines the way Penn had taught her to read composition. “The outer structure looks abstract, decorative. That’s deliberate. Penn used to talk about hiding meaning in plain sight—building symbols into designs so the viewer saw beauty first and the symbolism second.”
She pointed to a cluster of geometric shapes nested in the lower curve of the first one. “See how this triangle is inverted here but upright in the next iteration? And the number of lines crossing the central axis changes from version to version.”
She flipped forward three pages. The iterations continued, each one tighter, more refined. “He was testing different configurations. Figuring out how much information he could embed without breaking the aesthetic. The version Ginger photographed looked like a single design, but I think it’s actually a matrix.” She flipped back and forth, noting each tiny detail, every variation. “Each tattoo is customized. The base structure stays the same, but the internal symbols change, probably depending on who it was for.”
“He built a cipher inside a tattoo,” Sebastian said from beside her.
Sutton nodded, a bit of wonder in her voice. “Looks like it, but exactly does it link to?”
Claire made a note. Jasper had stopped scanning, eyes fixed on the sketchbook.
“If the internal symbols are role-specific,” Claire said, “then a detailed analysis of each tattoo could identify the wearer’s position within the organization.”
Sutton huffed. “So if you can decode this key, you can figure out their roles?”
“Possibly.” Claire scribbled notes faster now. “Their role and/or their rank in the organization.”
For the first time in six years, being Penn Crenshaw’s sister was an asset. Not a brand, not a scarlet letter, not the asterisk that followed her into every room. She was the only person alive who could read her brother’s shorthand, decode his visual language, translate the meaning buried inside his art. The knowledge lived in her, trained into her through years of sitting beside Penn, studying his technique, arguing about composition over coffee at two in the morning.
Sutton tapped the sketchbook. “This is the Rosetta Stone.”
They kept going. Sutton turned pages. Jasper scanned. Claire cataloged. The second sketchbook yielded more—not just designs but margin notes in Penn’s jagged handwriting. Dates that corresponded to nothing obvious, and initials that might be names or shorthand for something else entirely. There was a symbol repeated in the corners of several pages: a small circle with a vertical line through it, like a compass needle.
“Do you know what this means?” Claire pointed to the symbol.
