Page 55 of Cold Hard Truth

He grips the chair and stands up, every muscle in his chest once more on display in front of me as he flips it around and slides it back under the table.

“You sure you don’t want to know your fate?” I ask him one more time as he starts to walk away.

He pauses just long enough to look over his shoulder to smirk at me. “I’d rather be surprised.”

18

Sage

You learn a lotinking people for a living. What a person chooses to put on their body permanently says something about them—whether it’s a random tat they picked off the wall at eighteen or a full back-piece that’s been planned and tweaked for months.

Every drop of ink marks a person. It tells a story about what they like or don’t. What moments meant something.

Who they’ve loved and lost.

What matters.

Guess that’s why my own body is covered in chaos.

I’ve seen it all. Heard it all. Some days I wonder if I’m a tattoo artist or a fucking therapist. At least if I’m listening to other people, I don’t have to deal with the shit going on in my own head.

Tattooing is calming.

It centers me in a way nothing else can.

And that’s why I pass it on. After all, it’s the only good thing I’ve got to offer people.

Art always came naturally to me, and when Blaze learned that, he brought me on at Twisted Roses. Since I was only fourteen at the time, he’d make me practice on pig skin. I’d sweep up and sterilize. And I learned everything I could until he thought I was ready to start working on people.

Tattooing came easier to me than anything else when most of the shit in my life didn’t make sense.

Which is why, when Blaze sold the shop and the four of us bought it, I wanted to pass on what Blaze had done for me through mentoring others. And nothing is better than working with talent like Mason. Raw ability that just needs a little direction.

“That’s fucking beautiful.” I glance over his shoulder at the skull he’s inking on his client’s calf.

The eye sockets are perfectly shaded, and the snake wrapping around the dagger has 3-D scales. He’s almost as good as Crew with realism, but like every artist, he has his own unique signature.

Mason leans back, wiping the tat clean. “We were talking about a pop of color in the flowers.”

“Whatever you think.” I smack his shoulder and walk away.

The key to mentoring isn’t micromanaging them. I have to let them become their own artists. Which is why, slowly, I’ve been backing off and letting Mason make his own decisions. It’s one thing to teach a skill or give pointers on a design. But at the end of the day, art is personal.And he’s more talented than any other artist I’ve mentored in the past couple of years.

And twice as cocky.

If anyone thinks I’m bad with women, he’s worse. The thin apartment walls pay homage to his one-night stands. He has an aversion to commitment, which I could relate to, so it never bothered me. But Lyla didn’t seem to appreciate it when she moved in.

I make my way down the hall to the office and find Jude already waiting for me.

Jude’s wife, Fel, circled the shop a few minutes ago to let me know Lyla had made her way downstairs, and she was going to show her around the scheduling system. So I knew it was only a matter of time before Jude gave me shit about it.

At least if I’m stuck listening to Jude’s judgement, I can avoid Lyla a little longer. Because now that she’s living in my apartment and working at the shop, there’s no escape, and it’s driving me mad.

Those violet eyes are already fucking with my head just like they did years ago. They watch my every movement around the apartment. They haunt the back of my eyelids.

I thought I’d gotten over it—gotten over her.

Clearly, I’m just really good at burying shit.

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