Glancing down at my sketch pad, I slowed my breath and tried to keep the fragile control I had over my emotions when he was near. I focused on the page in front of me, committing the final image to memory, grounding myself in the familiar certainty of clean lines and resolved form.
Still, I could feel him behind me. The most unsettling part wasn’t that he was watching… it was the thrill of knowing he was.
4
ONYX
I’d been standing in my booth for the past twenty minutes pretending to be focused on reorganizing supplies, but my eyes kept drifting to Elena. Couldn’t help it. Every time I glanced over at her, that slow burn in my gut flared hot again.
She was in the same damn spot she always claimed during her downtime, the corner chair by the wall, her sketchbook balanced on her lap, and her pencil moving in precise, measured strokes. Her focus didn’t waver. Not once. The rest of the studio might as well not have existed.
From my angle, I could just make out part of the page. It was the same sketch I’d seen her working on yesterday. Or at least it started that way. She’d already replicated it once, perfectly. Now she was taking it apart layer by layer, reshaping and adjusting. Her pencil moved with purpose, altering the line weight in one section, then flipping the page to work a variation with a slightly different hierarchy.
This wasn’t creative exploration. Or trial and error. This was a dissection.
I watched the way her brow furrowed slightly with each new variation. She wasn’t doodling. She was solving something.
And I felt that familiar itch at the base of my skull.
That symbol had been bothering me for days. Not because it was familiar in the artistic sense. I’d seen a thousand different tattoos and decorative insignia over the years. But this one kept tugging at something in the back of my mind. Something older. Darker.
When my next client came in, I forced myself to snap out of it and get my shit together. The guy wanted a patch-up and extension to a geometric piece on his back. It took a couple of hours to get him cleaned, prepped, and inked, but my body was running on muscle memory the whole time. I still nailed it, but my brain wasn’t there. Not fully.
Not with Elena in the room. Not with those sketches on her lap.
After he left, I stripped off my gloves and dumped the waste in the bin, then turned and let myself drift toward her, my steps casual. No urgency in my walk. Just enough weight in my stride so she felt me coming before she heard me.
I stopped a few feet back, my arms folded and eyes on the page in front of her. She didn’t look up immediately, too focused on the curve she was adjusting. The page was covered in versions of the same symbol. Adjustments so subtle I doubted anyone else would’ve noticed unless they had experience decoding structure in ink, which I did.
Tattooing trains your eye. You learned to recognize intent. It wasn’t just about lines but what lived inside them—pressure, rhythm, and spacing.
Ink could tell you whether a design was done by a nervous hand or a confident one. I could tell you whether the lines carried purpose or were hiding something.
And what Elena was sketching didn’t look like a logo or a design pulled from some random Pinterest board.
It looked like a code.
Then it clicked in my head.
I’d seen that symbol before.
Not exactly, but close. Variants. Flipped orientation, different center weight, and sometimes with an extra notch or stroke added.
She wasn’t drawing art pieces.
They were fucking identifiers.
Syndicate marks.
The kind we’d encountered on bodies or walls during past conflicts with organized networks. Criminal groups that operated in the shadows with their own languages and their own hierarchy of symbols and signals.
This wasn’t speculation. It was a fact.
And she was drawing them with the kind of instinct that didn’t come from chance.
She stared at the page like the answers were hiding beneath the surface, and she was trying to coax them out.
I forced myself to speak, my tone low and even. “Where’d you find that symbol?”
