Page 5 of Shadow Secrets
And apparently, he didn’t know that the artist he’d hired for his shop was the sister of the man that good kid had killed.
“He didn’t like my portfolio,” Sutton said. Her voice came out flat enough to pass for normal.
Dom grunted. “His loss. You need anything?”
“Nope. All good.”
The door closed behind him with a click. Sutton sat on the stoop and sucked in cold air. Once she could breathe again, she tried to reassemble herself into something that could function for four more hours.
When she went back in, the lynx sketch was still on the counter. She picked it up. The drawing was rough but confident—clean lines, good instinct for negative space. The lynx was in profile, geometric shapes woven through the body like architecture. It was the kind of sketch an artist would make, not a client. She’d have loved it if it had come from anyone else.
She crumpled it in her hand and pitched it at the wastebasket. It hit the rim and ended up on the floor. With one of her boots, she stomped on it like it was a roach.
At two-fifteen, a woman named Jackie wanted a memorial piece for her mother—a hummingbird on her inner wrist, small and precise. Sutton prepped her skin with the stencil, gloved up, and let the needle take over.
The buzz was a frequency she could disappear into. That was the mercy of this work. When the needle was moving, the ink was flowing, and every atom of her focus was trained on getting the line right. There wasn’t room for anything else. No dead brothers. No blue-eyed strangers with steady voices. No anniversaries. Just the hum, the line, and the slow emergence of something beautiful on skin.
Jackie teared up when she saw the finished piece. “It’s perfect,” she said, her voice thick. “She would’ve loved it.”
Sutton smiled warmly enough to be genuine, contained enough to keep her own grief behind its wall. “I’m glad.”
After Jackie left, she cleaned her station and checked the schedule. One more client at four, then nothing. Dom had a supply run in Ridgeline and was heading out early, which meant she’d close alone. Good. She’d put on her playlist and turn it up loud to block out the silence.
She ate a granola bar from her bag and called it a late lunch. The studio apartment above the laundromat didn’t lend itself to meal prep—the stove had two burners, one of which worked on a schedule only it understood, and her refrigerator was the size of a dorm fridge and currently held coffee creamer, a questionable yogurt, and three cans of sparkling water. She’d gotten good at not eating much. You saved money that way, and money was a language she’d learned to speak fluently since the day her life split into before and after.
Before: art school in D.C., a shared apartment in Adams Morgan, a brother who’d buy her coffee, argue about panel composition, and show up at her crits to heckle from the back row. A future that had direction.
After: this. Loneliness, granola bars, endless days.
She caught herself at the crumpled, smashed lynx sketch and tore her gaze away. She grabbed her sketchbook and roughed in a new design—a woman made of thorns, curled around something small and glowing, protecting it or hiding it, the distinction deliberately unclear.
At four, her last client came in—a trucker named Dale who was slowly building a sleeve of Americana. She added a section of Route 66 signage and didn’t think about Sebastian Whitaker or Penn or the anniversary of his death.
Dale was done and out by five. Dom left at six with a wave and a reminder to lock the cash drawer. “See you Tuesday, kid.”
“Tuesday.”
The door closed behind him. The parlor went quiet. Just Sutton and the hum of the neon sign. She pulled up her playlist and piped it through the speakers. At closing time, she began the familiar routine—locking the door, sanitizing the stations, restocking, running the register tape.
The knock came at seven-fifteen, a full fifteen minutes after she’d flipped the sign to CLOSED.
Sutton was behind the counter, counting the cash drawer, when the sharp rap on the glass made her jump. She looked up and saw a young woman standing on the other side—early twenties, red hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a North Face jacket that cost more than Sutton’s monthly rent.
She had the polished, scrubbed look of someone who’d grown up in a house with a lawn service and a college fund, and she was standing on this block in Blackridge’s industrial district as if she’d accidentally fallen through a portal from a different zip code.
Sutton pointed at the CLOSED sign.
The woman knocked again. Leaned close to the glass. “Please. It’s not about a tattoo. I need to talk to you about Penn.”
Sutton froze, the cash drawer open in front of her, a stack of twenties in her hand. Her pulse racheted up and the floor tilted.
Nobody in Blackridge knew her. That was the entire point of staying here—two thousand miles from D.C. and the cable news cycle. A world away from her parents and the look people got when they connected the dots between her face and her brother’s crime.
She should ignore the woman. Walk out the back and go home.
The woman pressed her face against the glass. “Please, Sutton. I know you’re Penn’s sister. I have information about him. I think he was involved in something bigger than what made the news.”
The desperation in the woman’s voice sent a chill down her spine. Or maybe it was the words themselves. …he was involved in something bigger…
