Page 28 of Shadow Secrets
He’d been trained to classify and record visual information rapidly and move on. This time, he wasn’t moving on. The ink on her forearms was fully visible—the stylized florals winding from wrist to elbow, the hidden symbols he’d noticed at the parlor but hadn’t been able to study in detail. A rose nested in the vines above her left wrist. A tiny key at the base of her right thumb. A serpent—thin and elegant—tracing the inside of her forearm. Her own work. Her own language on her skin.
When she opened her eyes and caught him staring, her brown eyes registered his watching her with an expression that was equal parts wariness and curiosity. “You’re making it weird, Lynx.”
Hearing her say his callsign made his chest loosen. He’d shared why he’d embraced it, embraced the animal, because it was his. Not his family’s, not his former Secret Service role. Just his.
She quirked an eyebrow. He dropped his gaze to the floor and spread the blanket against the wall opposite the bed. He sat down, determined not to look at her again.
And then she sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress. “You were staring,” she said.
He pretended not to be embarrassed. “Threat assessment.”
“Of my tattoos?”
“Of the room.”
“You weren’t looking at the room.”
She wasn’t letting him off the hook. “If you’re going to ink me once this is over, I need to assess your workmanship.”
She chuckled. “If I ink you. The jury is out on that.”
That disappointed him for reasons he didn’t want to consider. He still didn’t meet her eyes. “Fair enough.”
She sighed dramatically. “I’m kidding. You’ve done a lot to help me in the past twenty-four hours.” Her voice softened. “I’ve been stupid and letting my emotions get the better of me, yet you haven’t called me on it.” A pause. “I might be dead if it weren’t for you.”
She would be dead, he had no doubt. If she’d tried to handle this on her own, she wouldn’t be sitting across from him right now, giving him grief about staring at her. Whatever she wanted to shovel at him over the past, he would take it. All he wanted was to keep her alive. “Just doing my job.”
“Wow, that’s the best you’ve got? Come on. This security gig is more than a job to you, isn’t it?”
The question came too close to setting off the emotions he’d buried for so long. He stretched out on the blanket and covered his eyes with his forearm. “Get some sleep, Sutton.”
After a long, pregnant silence, she turned off the light. The room dropped into near-darkness, broken only by the faint blue glow of the hallway emergency lighting seeping under the door. He heard the creak of the bed as she settled in again. The rustle of sheets.
Her voice cut through the dark. “How do you think he got involved?”
Sebastian stared at the ceiling. “With the organization?”
“Yeah. How does a tattoo artist from Falls Church end up designing coded identification marks for some shadow network with ties to the intelligence community?”
He’d been turning that question over since Claire had told them about Inkwell. The operational part of his brain had already built a working theory. “Recruitment usually starts with the work. So someone walks into his shop and becomes a regular client. They test him with small asks first. Design something custom. Something with specific elements. They pay well and in cash. They flatter his talent and build trust.”
“And then the asks get bigger.”
“Always. By the time you realize you’re into something illegal or dangerous, you’re already leveraged. You’ve done work you can’t undo. You know names you can’t unknow. The exit disappears behind you.”
The bed creaked as she sat up again. He could feel the weight of her eyes on him in the dark.
This was safer territory, and the fact he couldn’t see how the tank top molded to her shape helped. “Did Penn have political leanings?” he asked. “Anything that might have made him a target for recruitment through ideology?”
“Penn didn’t even vote.” A pause. “But he had opinions. Strong ones. He hated the machine—the revolving door between government and private money. Lobbyists, defense contractors, the way policy gets made in back rooms. He used to rant about it at dinner until my dad told him to shut up and eat.” She was quiet for a moment. “But I don’t think ideology is what got him in. I think it was money.”
Money was the most common reason, but not always. “Why?”
“Because I know what a tattoo artist in D.C. makes and Penn’s apartment was nicer than it should have been. I noticed. I just—I thought he was doing side work. Or Mom was sneaking him money. He did do custom pieces for high-end clients. Even a few celebrities and politicians who wanted ink but didn’t want to be seen in a street-level shop.” She exhaled. “Turns out I was half right.”
The mattress shifted. He heard pages turning. She’d pulled one of Penn’s sketchbooks from beside the bed. She flipped the light back on, her brow furrowed.
“The coded designs start about a third of the way through this book,” she said. “Everything before that is standard client work. No margin notes. No initials. Just clean, beautiful tattoo art. Then there’s a gap—five or six blank pages—and after that, the organization work begins. Like he made a decision. Crossed a line.”
