Page 26 of Reaper and Ruin

I hoped he didn’t see the half-smile that crept across my face as I turned away and jogged out the door.

My bike waited for me in the lot and made quick work of getting me into town. I got to the tattoo shop five whole minutes before the time Dax had texted me to start.

Five minutes I could have spent with Whip was my first instinct, but my second was if I wasn’t in bed with him and Violet, then the shop was definitely the next best place to be.

I couldn’t stop the grin that emerged just from knowing this was where I was supposed to be. I wasn’t much into all that woo-woo bullshit, but Lynx, my old cellmate, had been. I suspected he would have said my soul had a connection here. At least that’s what it felt like each time I walked in and saw the art covering every available surface.

Dax stopped wiping down a table, and leaned over it, offering me his hand. “First day. You scared?”

I squinted at him as I shook his hand. “Should I be? Is there a hazing ritual I need to pass first?”

A blond guy, with the most piercing blue eyes I’d ever seen, paused from where he was drawing on an iPad. “Dax didn’t tell you about that?”

I glanced at Dax. “No?”

He stifled a laugh and shrugged.

I turned back to the blond guy, pulling back my shoulders. “I’m up for it, whatever it is.”

“Good, because I’m just about done designing your new tattoo.” He grinned and turned the iPad around to show me.

It was a bright-yellow rubber ducky.

It was hideous and ridiculous and didn’t match with any of the other ink I had covering my skin. It would stick out like dogs’ balls.

Both men laughed at my expression.

Dax slapped me on the back. “He’s joking. There’s no initiation. We aren’t that Neanderthal.”

The blond guy stood and offered me a fist bump. “Couldn’t resist messing with you. I’m Roarke.”

“Not to be confused with me,” another voice called from a storeroom off to the side.

I jumped a little, not realizing there was anyone else there, and then an identical face to Roarke’s popped out around the doorjamb. “Hey. I’m King. Well, Tim King, if you want to be specific, but since our parents gave Roarke the bad-boy tattooist name and me a name only fit for an accountant, I go by King.”

Roarke sniggered and flashed the iPad at his brother. “Like my ducky?”

King recoiled. “That’s fucking hideous. What dumb asshole wants that?”

Dax laughed, peering over Roarke’s shoulder at it, and then over at me. “Friend of yours, actually.”

I groaned. “Let me guess, X wants Reginald written in a banner underneath it too?”

Roarke sniggered. “How did you know?”

“Don’t ask.”

Dax chuckled, but then a customer walked in, and then another, and pretty soon the place was a busy hum of consistent activity. I didn’t do much, with it being my first day, and there was a lot of me cleaning off tables between clients, running to the storeroom and blindly searching it, hoping I would be able to find whatever it was the guys had asked for. But there was also a lot of time watching them work. Marveling at the way they moved the tattoo gun across skin to bring together designs I could only dream of creating. They all had different styles, and I didn’t know where mine would fit in here, but an excitement pulsed inside me, a desperate need for knowledge.

I wanted to learn everything they knew until I could sit where they were.

It was fucking humbling, starting at the bottom, knowing nothing other than this is where I wanted to be.

It was late afternoon when the bell above the shop door rang. I paused, broom in my hand, mid floor sweep, and a slow grin spread across my face at Violet in the doorway, Nyah by her side.

Nyah squealed at the sight of Dax and ran across the small space to throw herself at him. But Violet just smiled at me sweetly, respecting the fact I was at work.

I appreciated that, even though all I wanted to do was storm over and wrap her in my arms. I did a full visual sweep of her, checking her over, making sure she was okay after everything that had gone down.