Page 59 of Shadow Secrets
I’m staying, she tried to say. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.
The words didn’t come out.
Sebastian’s arm tightened around her.
The world went dark.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sebastian
Two weeks later
Sebastian lay on his back on Sutton’s tattoo table at Iron Rose, his shirt off, her right hand moving across his skin.
The needle hummed. The afternoon light came through the front windows at an angle that meant it was past three—Dom’s usual tea-break hour, though Dom wasn’t in the parlor today. He’d worked three days this week already, and Sutton had insisted he stay home. But he was threatening to be back full-time by the first week of December, whether his doctor—or Sutton—approved.
It had been fourteen days since he’d carried Sutton out through the front door and felt her body go limp in his arms. Fourteen days since hospital waiting rooms, concussion protocols, and a stitched-up shoulder that the ER doctor had described, with professional detachment, as one of the more photogenic grazes he’d seen.
Photogenic. Jesus.
She’s alive. The phrase kept finding him at odd moments—driving home from the grocery store, reaching for his coffee, lying in bed in the early morning hours listening to her breathe. She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive. It was a mantra he hadn’t chosen but couldn’t stop repeating.
The bullet had nicked her shoulder, but it had been inches away from putting her in a coffin.
The needle paused. “You’re thinking loudly again.” Sutton didn’t look up from her work. Her injured shoulder rode high under her T-shirt, still wrapped in a thick, white bandage he changed twice a week. It restricted her range, but it didn’t stop her. Her right hand was the working hand, and it was fine.
“Habit.”
“Uh huh.” She dipped the needle into the ink cup. “Stay still. I’m on the whiskers.”
He stayed still.
The lynx was going in over his scar. Her idea—she’d floated it two days after she was discharged from the hospital, sketchbook on her lap, her left arm in a sling. “The scar’s the wrong kind of permanent,” she’d said. “Let me give you a different one on top of it. Something you chose.”
She hadn’t asked him to forgive Penn. She hadn’t asked him to forget what the bullet had done to him. She’d asked if he wanted a piece of art, made by her, living on the same patch of skin where her brother had nearly killed him. A reclamation.
He’d said yes before she’d finished the question.
Now the lynx was taking shape across his left side—crouched low, eyes forward, the geometric shapes she’d woven through its body making the scar beneath it almost invisible, absorbed into the composition. The entry wound had become part of the cat’s chest. Penn’s bullet path was a structural element of the animal’s anatomy. Destruction made into design.
It was genius work. He’d told her so already. She’d rolled her eyes and told him he was biased.
He was biased. She was also a genius.
Her shoulder tattoo—the crescent moon in branches, the piece Penn had given her for her eighteenth birthday—had taken the worst of the bullet’s path. The graze had torn through the middle of the branches, leaving a healing line of scar tissue that ran diagonally across Penn’s linework. Dom had offered to re-ink it once she was fully healed. A Blackridge artist who’d apprenticed under Penn in D.C. had reached out, too—said it would be an honor to restore a piece her brother had done.
Sutton had said no to all of it.
“It’s mine,” she’d told Sebastian that night, her hand tracing the edge of the bandage. “The whole thing. His work and what happened to it. I don’t want anyone to touch it. I want the mark of that day on my body the same way you have the mark of his day on yours. A thing I survived. A thing we both survived.”
He hadn’t argued. He’d understood.
Now, as he watched her face as she worked on the lynx, he said, “I’m buying the farmhouse.”
Her hand paused. The needle lifted a fraction off his skin. Then she resumed, her expression carefully controlled. “From Nesbitt?”
“He’s been trying to sell it for two years. I made him an offer yesterday. He accepted this morning.”
