Her heaved sigh brings me back to the present, and I look down to find her facing me as Jude tattoos her collarbone and across her upper chest. Fuck, even I know that hurts, but she barely reacts, just the occasional baring of teeth.
“I always wanted a tattoo,” she tells me, taking a deep inhale when he hits a spot close to the bone.
“Yeah?” I stroke her hair again, unable to help myself. There’s something about the way her body relaxes in contentment when I do it that’s becoming addictive.
“Yeah, but Rufus wouldn’t let me. Some bullshit about ‘women shouldn’t have tattoos. It’s not ladylike’.” She lowers her voice in a terrible imitation of her pops, and both Jude and I scoff at his outdated views.
“What tattoo would you have chosen?” I ask, and I see Jude perk up, his eyes not leaving her body, even as his spine straightens a little.
“Birds. Flying free,” she answers straight away with no hesitation. A pang of something sharp stabs me in the solar plexus, and I can’t fucking breathe for a second. We may treat her like a pampered pet, but she’s just as trapped here now as she was with Adam Taylor and his men, and her father and the Dead Soldiers before us. This is her prison.
“Why flying free?” Jude questions and I jolt to think that she wanted to be free long before she came here.
“I’ve spent my whole life being trapped in one prison or another. For once, I’d like to feel the wind in my wings.”
I look away from her and see Jude paused in his work, his hand hovering over her skin as he swallows roughly. I glance back at our Little Bird to see her fists clenched, but I feel that it’s the past that’s causing her distress rather than the pain from her new ink.
The saying goes that if you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.
But that's bullshit. I think that if you love something, you keep it close.
If you don’t, someone will come and steal it away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“BIG BAD WOLF” BY ROSES & REVOLUTIONS
TARL
Istep back, the sound of the tooth hitting the metal dish loud in the vast, windowless warehouse Aeron and I are in. The man in front of us gurgles, the ruby-red of blood dribbling down his chin. He can’t move his head to spit it out and can’t move his body as he’s strapped on a metal gurney that’s tilted up to allow me access to do my bloody work.
“You’ve already squealed like a fucking pig, Soldier scum,” Aeron says, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, his jacket laid carefully out of range on the table containing my tools. “So why not give us something useful and we can ease up a little, huh?”
“Fuck you, Tailor brat!” the pig—a foot soldier, I believe, by the lack of chevrons on his person. The Soldiers like to ink their rank onto their skin, using the US Armed Forces insignia. Typical that they’d send a grunt to spy on us, they don’t give a shit about their members and new recruits need to prove themselves somehow.
“No thanks,” Aeron replies, giving me a nod and I delve back in, grabbing another molar with my pliers and bracing my boot against the gurney. The pig tries to bite down, but my grip on his jaw keeps his mouth open, preventing that nonsense, and so with a lot of tugging and a cry of pain from him, I wrench another tooth out to add to my collection.
Just think of me as the tooth fairy. Only, without the wings.
Clinkit goes as it lands with the other three in my dish. I’ll clean them off later, maybe I’ll make Jude a necklace, or a pair of cufflinks. So many options for a creative person like myself.
“Anything else to say?” Aeron asks after our pig stops squealing.
“Yeah, I hear your mom screamed like a whore when the Soldiers each took their turn!”
Oh. Shit.
Aeron goes deadly still, and I can barely see him breathe as he stares at our victim, who most definitely will be a Dead Soldier before long. Just not how he’d hoped.
Heather Taylor’s kidnap and rape started this war between the Tailors and Dead Soldiers over a decade ago. It was the catalyst for what has been ten long years of bloodshed and pain, the tit-for-tat cycle we can’t seem to get out of. First Heather, then Lark’s mom was shot, dying in Lark’s arms on her twelfth birthday. They shot June two years after that, Jude unable to stop the blood flowing as she bled out before him, and now we have Lark, the Soldiers’ Darling as they call her, on account of her being Rufus Jackson’s, the leader of the Dead Soldiers, daughter.
“Tarl. The Cradle.”
A fissure of excitement runs through me at Aeron’s words. I haven't had a play with this toy for a while, and admittedly it’s one of my favorites. Dropping the pliers in the dish, I wipe my hands on my butcher's apron, then grab the gurney, releasingthe brakes and wheeling it over to where my beautifully restored Judas Cradle sits.
It’s an original, used by the inquisitors from the sixteenth century, and the dark wood gleams. It’s a beautiful design, simplistic really, but it definitely gets them talking. Well, screaming. A wooden pyramid sits atop four wooden legs, and it stands about ten feet tall. I added a metal tip to the pyramid top, all the better for penetration.
Dangling above it is a metal hoop that’s attached to ropes hanging from the ceiling. I lower the hoop to prepare for attaching it around his waist.
