She nodded toward the guy’s back. “Just below the scapula. High enough to hide with a shirt, low enough to stay out of collar range.”
Strategic placement. Meant to stay hidden but accessible. Easily flashed without being overt.
I stepped around as Darren peeled off his shirt. His back was lean but muscular. A nasty scar near the shoulder blade said he’d been stitched up at some point, but it was old. Another flick of my eyes to his lower back spotted a wound from a bullet. I’d seen enough of them on my brothers and Ink’s Mafia relatives to recognize it.
Elena drew my attention back to her as she placed the stencil, her fingers moving with that same calm grace I’d seen a hundred times now. She worked like the world didn’t exist beyond the lines she drew.
The symbol was a variant of one she’d sketched two weeks ago. Same base pattern, different interior cuts. The tapering line ended in a directional hook. Subtle, elegant, and precise. The more you stared, the more you saw—slight line weight changes, a tiny notch at one junction, and one curl flattened into an angle. Those variations meant function, position, and rank.
This wasn’t a tattoo. It was a fucking badge.
But it didn’t match the ones traced back to Marks’s syndicate.
It was from a separate cluster I’d known I’d seen somewhere…
That’s when it hit me. I didn’t know how I had fucking missed it all this time.
She hadn’t just been sketching these things for study. Hadn’t just been decoding or redrawing.
Elena was deploying them.
Marks was using her to catalog symbols, but he was also using her to place them.
And not for his own syndicate.
Because this symbol didn’t match the group Rebel linked to Marks's last night. This one belonged to a different set entirely—one Wizard flagged as being under surveillance in Florida. A group with ties to smuggling and black-market biometric spoofing.
Which meant this guy, Darren, wasn’t Marks’s partner.
He was a fucking operative.
Marks was using her to brand his people. Not with his symbols… but with those belonging to other criminal organizations.
That’s how they got in.
Elena was the bridge.
She absorbed a design with near-perfect recall, redrew it without reference, and tattooed it flawlessly onto operatives who were embedding into rival groups. She was inking a mark onthis guy who would gain him access to a network she didn’t even know existed.
I watched her smooth the skin, adjust the light, and pick up her gun to start the outline. Her lines were clean, balanced, and deliberate. She was incredibly talented.
But now I saw it all through a different perspective.
All those sketchbook exercises, those reference images he fed her through assignments, critiques, and partials disguised as “reconstruction drills.”
He’d been training her. Fucking grooming her.
And I finally knew why.
Except it wasn’t only about the operatives and their tattoos.
Elena wasn’t just someone with a good eye and fast hands.
She remembered. Recreated. Identified.
She saw the differences that mattered—hook orientation, notch placement, and weight distribution. And when he asked her to redraw them weeks or months later, she added in what he’d missed.
She was memorizing the language. But more than that, she was internalizing it.
