The change is immediate.
It’s only a little light, weak and bluish. Nothing like the lamp. It’s still enough to drag me one step back from the edge.
Shiloh sets the phone on the nightstand where the lamp sits dead. The beam throws strange shadows across the carved headboard and paints the room in silver-blue.
“Temporary fix,” he says. “But it’ll do till the power comes back.”
My breathing stutters.
His gaze flicks from the phone to the lamp to me. Understanding moves across his face—not all the way, not the why of it, but the shape. He knows the dark matters.
He doesn’t make me explain. That mercy hits harder than it should, and I blink rapidly.
“Come here,” he murmurs.
I should tell him to leave. I should lock the door after him and ride this out alone, like I always do.
Instead, I take one step, then another, until I’m close enough to feel the heat coming off him.
He reaches slowly, telegraphing every movement. One hand settles at my waist. The other lifts, pauses beside my face, then brushes damp hair off my cheek.
His thumb strokes once beneath my eye. “Breathe for me.”
I hate that my body listens. I hate that it listens easier to him than to me right now.
He eases me backward until the backs of my knees hit the bed, then sits and pulls me down with him so I’m half-turned in his lap, one leg tucked awkwardly beneath me, my palms braced against his shoulders.
The phone light skims over his throat. Over the ink trailing across his collarbone and down his chest and arms.
Ink.
The thought hits like cold water.
The note I was sent said Deacon was seen at Noir. Maybe once. Maybe more.
I still don’t know what these men are tied to, who they answer to, which lines they’ll cross with a smile.
Trust is how you die. My hand lifts before I can stop it.
Shiloh goes still when my fingers lightly skim the ink over his collarbone, testing.
His mouth quirks, faint and gone in a blink. “That your way of sayin’ thank you?”
“I’m checking something.”
He studies me. Doesn’t joke this time. “Checking what?”
I don’t answer.
I trail my fingers over the tattoo at the top of his chest, deliberate as a search warrant. Script. Blackwork. A wing. Thorned vines curling over muscle. I follow each line with slow care, pretending the tremor in my hand is leftover panic and not the fact that he’s warm and breathing and watching me like I matter.
His pec jumps lightly under my fingers, and his breathing quickens. Mine does, too.
There are no rosary beads. No cross worked into the lines. No chain of black dots and tiny links burned into my memory from the one mark I’ve hunted so long it haunts me awake.
I keep looking. Keep touching him.
I shift closer for a better angle, using the light from the phone sitting on the bedside table. The beam catches on his skin, throws the ink into relief. More script. Knife. Smoke. Flowers maybe, done dark enough they read like bruises in this light.
