He closed his eyes and let the pain wash over him, let it temper the fear rather than worsen it. Let it remind him he was no longer that boy on a ranch, protected by the people who’d raised him, the boy who had once craved something more. He was a man forging himself anew, carving the first mark of his future into his own flesh because he chose it, because he wanted to claim the path he was about to walk.
When the buzzing finally quieted, the sudden stillness felt heavy, almost ceremonial. Fly lifted his arm slowly, skin sore and flushed, and looked down at what had been inked into him.
The band circled his upper arm like it had always belonged there. The black ink rode the swell of his bicep, catching the dim light in clean, deliberate strokes. It looked fierce, steady, almost ancient, as though it had been carved from the ocean’s own language and laid over the muscle it now claimed. When he flexed, just testing, just curious, the tattoo moved with him, tightening, accentuating the power beneath it, making the entire mark seem alive.
A quiet breath escaped him, almost a laugh, almost disbelief.
It was him. Not the boy he’d been, but the man he was becoming.
Shamrock let out a low whistle. “Christ on a cracker. When he flexes like that, the tattoo practically begs someone to touch it.”
Bolt laughed. “Women are gonna pass out.”
Than smiled, gentle and sincere. “It suits you, brother.”
Fly ran his fingers lightly over the sting, felt the pulse of heat beneath the ink, and nodded as something settled deep and certain inside him.
Pain had made room for purpose.
And purpose had found its mark.
Bolt stretched out on the padded table with the lazy swagger of a man pretending this was nothing more than a joke he’d been waiting all week to tell. That was the performance, the grin, the easy slouch, the casual lift of his shirt, all of it a smoke screen to hide the truth of what this tattoo meant.
Because he knew exactly when this bolt had been forged.
Not for the sake of a good story or female attention, though he'd let the others believe that.
It had been born on that endless, brutal Around-the-World Paddle, when exhaustion blurred into delirium and the world narrowed to salt and pain and the desperate pull of oars. When they’d all been hallucinating and Shamrock had gone over the side to save Fly, vanishing into the black water like a nightmare. Bolt had gone in after him without a heartbeat’s hesitation. He’d followed his swim buddy because there was no universe where he wouldn’t.
The lightning bolt wasn’t about flash or sex or swagger. It was about that moment.
That split-second where instinct became loyalty became life. But no one needed to know that.
Let them think he was getting this so women would swoon and yank down his waistband for a peek. Hell, it wasn’t entirely untrue. He was a red-blooded American badass in his damn prime. Getting tail wasn’t out of the equation.
But the real meaning stayed under his skin, right where the ink was going.
The shop light haloed across his chest and down the hard lines of his abdomen, the muscles tightening and relaxing with each easy breath.
He’d been in a hundred places more dangerous than this, but there was something about sitting still in a room this clean, this bright, this exposed that curled a memory through his gut, the kind that took him back to alley mouths and shelter cots, to nights when lowlifes and predators looked at his pretty-boy face and thought they could take whatever they wanted. He’d escaped all of them. Outrun them. Outsmarted them. But now he was being forged into the kind of man America’s enemies feared, and the bite of the needle felt like proof of it, pain chosen, not inflicted. A mark he owned, not one the world tried to leave on him.
“What you want?” the artist asked.
Bolt pulled a drawing from the back pocket of his jeans.
“Where you want it?”
“From here to here,” he trailed his finger down.
The artist didn’t even blink. He nodded.
Bolt grinned. “Make it clean,” he told the tattooist. “Sharp. I want it to look like it could actually strike.”
Perfect.
Chaos with intention. His favorite kind.
“Pants and underwear off. Flat on your back on the table. I have a drape for modesty. You can change back there.”
