When breakfast ended, I stood and pulled him with me. The others watched, curious but not unkind, and I could feel the question floating in the air: How far would we go with this?
Far enough, I thought.
I looked at Levi, who met my gaze head-on, and nodded. We were done hiding, and the family knew it. In the end, it wasn’t a spectacle or a fight. It was just us, together, shoulder to shoulder.
Sometimes, that was enough.
It was Bo who finally did it. The youngest always broke first. He stabbed his fork in the direction of Levi’s wrist, grin sharp enough to cut. “Nice bracelet you got there, Levi,” he said, dragging the words out so everyone had time to clock the meaning.
The table froze. Even the eggs seemed to stop steaming.
Levi flinched. His eyes darted to me, a silent question telegraphed across two feet of scarred pine and a year’s worth of unsaid things. The heat rushed up his neck, painting his ears a color you didn’t find in the natural world.
I didn’t hesitate. I never did, when it counted.
“He’s mine,” I said. No preamble, no apology. Just fact. My voice came out lower than I meant, and it shook the air like a threat and a promise in one.
The effect was immediate.
Ma let out a ragged little gasp and pressed her napkin to her mouth, tears leaking out even though her smile was so wide it threatened to split her face. Pa nodded once, slow and solemn, then went back to his coffee like the universe had finally slotted into place. Knox and Newt both grinned, the kind of grin that said about time, and Bo howled so loud he nearly lost his chair.
Levi just stared at me, like he wasn’t sure if he’d heard right.
I turned his wrist in my hand so the black letters faced up:Quiad, stamped deep. He covered my hand with his own, fingers small but strong, and the blush on his cheek spread all the way to his collarbone. He looked around the table, then back at me, and for the first time, he didn’t look away.
The noise of the kitchen roared back to life—laughter, forks, Ma’s wet sniffling—but it all blurred at the edges. For a long moment, there was only the heat of Levi’s hand, the faint pulse in his wrist, and the band that bound him to me.
We ate the rest of breakfast that way, side by side, not saying much but saying everything.
Afterward, as the others drifted out to chores or errands or just to make noise somewhere else, Levi stayed close. He touched the bracelet every few minutes, like he had to keep checking that it was real. Sometimes he caught me watching and rolled his eyes, but he never let go.
When it was finally quiet, he said, “You really mean it?”
I looked at him, at the freckles on his nose and the stubborn set of his jaw, and nodded. “I’ve always meant it.”
He grinned, soft and bright, and leaned in so our shoulders bumped. That was all the answer either of us needed. Some things, you only had to say once.
Chapter Four
~ Levi ~
The first thing you notice about Inked Rebellion is the smell. Not the bitter, metallic sting you get at a hospital or the musty chemical haze of a high school locker room, but something deeper. Nostalgic and sharp and clean, like antiseptic on raw skin, overlaid with the woody sweetness of Ransom’s cologne and the heavy, permanent musk of ink.
Even if you closed your eyes and forgot you were in McKenzie River, you’d know exactly where you were: in a place that dealt in pain and memory, etched under the skin in black and scarlet and every shade of gray.
After that fiasco with my stepmother, Vivian, Ransom had taken almost six months off before getting his tattoo business back up and running, but it was only open three days a week and closed by nine, which was when Floyd got off work.
I’d told myself I was just here to watch. To sketch a new design for my own tattoo, to see if I could handle the buzz of the gun and the anticipation of the needle. But as soon as I walked into the parlor, it was clear I’d been lying. I was here to do it. No more half-assing, no more what-ifs. The bracelet Quiad gave me was everything, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted something that couldn’t slip off in the night or get hidden under a sleeve. Something nobody, not even me, could take back.
Ransom was already set up at his station, hunched over a laminated printout of a dragon coiled around a naked woman. He glanced up when the bell on the door jingled, flicked his gaze up and down my frame, and grinned. His beard was trimmed down to a stubble today, so you could really see the bite marks at the corner of his mouth and the scar on his chin.
The walls around him were plastered with flash art—some of it his, some of it cribbed from other shops, a whole museum ofold-school Americana and the weird shit locals brought in from internet forums. A neon sign above the register blinked INKED REBELLION in red-and-blue, the “N” half-burnt out so it just pulsed INKED REBELLIO_ every five seconds.
“You here for moral support or you actually gonna man up this time?” Ransom said, tapping the dragon printout with a gloved finger. He always put on gloves even before he started, like the ink could seep through the air and stain you without warning.
I pulled my sketchbook out of my hoodie pocket—one of Quiad’s, oversized, sleeves dragged over my hands so the world felt a little smaller. My heart was jackhammering in my chest, but I kept my face as still as I could.
“Appointment’s at three, right?” I asked, trying not to sound like I was about to puke. “Don’t want to cut in line.”
