Moments later, Jude returned. “No spare rooms.”
“I’m not going back in there, sir,” Lily sniffed. “Not withher.”
Warren sighed. Then he looked at Jude. “She can have my room.”
Jude’s brows shot up. “Mr Bailey, that’s—”
“I’ll bunk with you.”
Jude blinked. Swallowed. Looked at Lily, then back at Warren.
“It’s that or she sleeps in the hallway.” Warren widened his eyes at him.
Jude ran a hand down his face. “Fine. Okay.” He pulled a keycard from his pocket and handed it over. “Get her settled. I need to change.”
Warren took it, nodding, and watched Jude walk off, his door shutting quietly behind him. He then helped Lily collect her things, got her into his room with a promise that she wouldn’t have to speak to Amelia until morning, then grabbed his own bag and headed across the corridor. He knocked. No answer. Maybe Jude was in the bathroom. So he pressed the keycard to the lock. The light turned green. The door clicked open, and as Warren stepped inside.
The breath slipped from his lungs.
Jude stood with his back to the door, fresh from the shower, a towel slung low on his hips, still damp from steam, halfway to collecting a folded T-shirt on the bed, his hair darkened and curling tighter at the nape of his neck. But what had Warren breathless, struggling to drag professionalism back over instinct, was the black ink etched low across the small of Jude’s back. A looping band of barbed wire dipping into a harsh V disappearing beneath the towel, trailing down towards the cleft of his spine. It wasn’t just ink. It wascrafted. Striking in its precision, brutal inits implication. Each barb curved with surgical intent, drawn not like art, but warning.
It clung to him with purpose. Not for beauty. Not for vanity.
A mark of ownership.
And the way it hugged the hollow of Jude’s back, right at the point where vulnerability met survival, it wasn’t decoration.
That was his history lesson.
Warren couldn’t look away.
He’d seen tattoos like that before. In prison photos. Gang profiles. Survivor files. But never this delicate. Never thisintentional. And never on someone like Jude.
Jude reached for the shirt and paused, sensing him. He glanced over his shoulder. Warren blinked, stepped back half a pace, suddenly very aware of the line he was standing on.
“Sorry.” He couldn’t even recognise his own voice. “Didn’t mean to walk in on you.”
Jude yanked the T-shirt on, the barbed wire disappearing beneath it, and Warren knew with bone-deep certainty that everything had changed.
CHapter twelve
Tighter than Barbed Wire
Jude knew he’d been seen.
Ithad been seen.
The ink. The mark. The truth he never let breathe.
And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
He could lie, of course. Say it was a choice. A design he’d picked during a rebellious phase. A symbol of strength, maybe. A reminder of some vague philosophy about pain and survival. He could say he liked it. Kept it for the aesthetics.
But all of that was bollocks.
The real reason he’d never had it covered?
Because part of himneededthe reminder. The quiet shame. The burn. The brand. A warning etched into skin, so he never forgot who he’d been and what he’d let happen. And who he couldn’t afford to be again.
