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Jess had beat us both through the door ever since.

While we all had a pretty similar music taste and I couldn’t really complain about her choices, she had this weird quirk where she listened to her playlistin order. No shuffling allowed. I could nearly tell the time depending on which song was playing at that moment.

Apparently, I was a little late to work that morning, because that one A Day to Remember song that I really liked was on, and usually I was already deep in focus by the time it rolled around.

Jess offered me a smile in greeting, already on the phone to a customer and doodling on her notepad as the person on the other end talked her ear off.

Prince was already at his station, working hunch-backed over the custom piece he’d been slaving over for weeks.

The client was a friend of ours, a guy who appreciated Prince’s style maybe more than anyone else on the planet. When he decided to get a full back piece and told Prince that he had free reign over the design, Princey was both salivating with excitement and visibly jittery with nerves.

The perfectionist in him wouldn’t leave it alone until he thought it was good enough.

“The more you fuck with it, the more you’re gonna hate it,” I reminded him, pulling up a stool to sit and watch him work.

“Too late,” he grumbled under his breath, lifting his black-rimmed glasses and sitting them atop his head. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a breath, and I could tell that he’d already been here for hours.

Harlen Prince had founded Graze Ink not long after he finished his apprenticeship.

Dude was talented, way ahead of his years.

After I dropped out of school and found myself searching for something to do other than pushing trolleys at the local grocery store, he accepted me as his own apprentice, based on a few mediocre sketches that I had shown him and probably a little pity.

He could tell that I needed money.

While my mother was a warm and wonderful woman, she’d never been good with money. Any cash that came our way went into the pokies or lotto tickets, along with stories of what our lives would be like once she finally hit it big.

“Today’s a lucky day, Ashy,” she’d say on her way out the door at around 10 in the morning, coincidentally the same time that the pubs opened. “I can feel it.”

I’d wish her luck and ride my bike to work.

Still, whatever the reason was that Prince decided to take a chance on me, I would be forever grateful. I had no idea where I would be in life if it wasn’t for him.

Which was why I was so stoked when he finally took over as Prez for the club. It was easier to follow someone’s orders when you respected them.

That had been King’s major flaw as president—no one respected him.

They mostly followed what he said because of the fear of consequence, not because they actually believed in what he was trying to accomplish.

But Prince was going to take the club to the next level. We wouldn’t be scraping the bottom of the barrel for the Santino’s leftovers for much longer.

It was almost cliche at this point whenever an MC said that they were going to get out of crime, to run a straight club with legit profits, but that was Princey’s end game.

He assured us that it would take a while to get there, of course, and we were all fine with getting our hands dirty if that was what it would take to protect the club.

“Where did you go last night?” he asked as Jess wandered into the back alley for a smoke break, already nose deep in her phone and ignoring us.

“I had to go and sort some shit out,” I mumbled, pushing away from him and heading to my own station before he could smell the bullshit.

“Right,” he continued to eye me. “So you didn’t go to the girl’s house?”

I shrugged.

There was no point in lying to him. He only asked questions that he already knew the answer to.

Prince shook his head, throwing his glasses on the desk and heading over to my station, not dropping the subject, apparently.

“Look,” he said in a hushed tone, “I’m not gonna tell you to stay away, ‘cause I know it’d be useless.”