MARKED BY TWO RUTHLESS BIKER ALPHAS

The man in Mara's chair had been bleeding for twenty minutes and still hadn't told her his name, which was fine, because the wound was telling her everything she didn't want to know. It ran along his left side, just under the ribs, a s***h as long as her hand. A normal cut would have clotted by now. This one wept slow and dark at the edges, the skin around it gone grey and shiny, like something left too long in a freezer. It didn't look like it was healing. It looked like it was being argued with. Silver, Mara thought, and her stomach did a slow, unpleasant roll. "You're staring," he said. "You're dripping." She snapped a fresh glove over her wrist hard enough to sting. "Wren is very attached to this linoleum. She'll want a deposit." He didn't smile. She wasn't sure his face knew how. He sat in the tattoo chair the way other men sat on thrones, one arm draped along the rest, jaw cut with a ruler, black hair shoved back by a hand that had given up on it hours ago. His leather jacket lay across her counter, on top of her sketchbook, which she resented. His black T-shirt was rolled to the ribs and soaked through on one side. His eyes were the color of strong tea under the flickering overhead tube. Then he shifted, and the neon from the window slid across them, and for half a second they flashed gold. She had not imagined it. Mara had a lot of rules, and most of them existed because of that exact flash. She cleared her throat. "There's a hospital on Fifth. Twelve minutes by bike. I could draw you a map." "Hospitals ask questions." "So do I. Who are you, and why is a man with a silver burn bleeding in my chair at twelve forty in the morning?" Something moved behind his face. It wasn't surprise. It was recalculation, like a man who'd just found a second lock on a door he'd planned to kick in. "You know what it is." "I know a lot of things I'd rather not." She jabbed a gloved finger at the wall behind him, where an index card had yellowed in its frame. Wren's cramped handwriting read NO CLIENTS AFTER MIDNIGHT. Underneath, in Mara's slanted pen, someone had added (especially the tall ones). "House rule. Two of them, actually. Come back during business hours." "I'll be dead by then." "Dramatic." "Accurate." He said it flat, with no heat at all, and the flatness did more than a shout would have. "I need it covered. Tonight. A design large enough to hide the mark and dense enough that nobody looks twice. I'll pay triple your rate." Her rate for a piece that size was three hundred dollars. Triple was nine hundred. Her tuition balance was two thousand, one hundred and forty dollars and glowing red in a browser tab she'd stopped being brave enough to close. She hated herself a little for the math. "Why does it need hiding?" she asked. "There are men who'd like to know I'm hurt." "And you think a tattoo hides that?" She should have said no. Wren was upstairs, asleep with her hearing aids in a cup on the nightstand, and Wren had been very clear about nights and tall men with golden eyes. But a silver burn didn't just hurt. It kept hurting. Mara had watched a cut like this one on a stray dog once, years ago, behind the shop. She remembered how long it had taken the dog to stop shaking. "Fine," she said. "But if you pass out, I'm not carrying you." Mara hooked the stool closer with her foot and tried not to notice how the room rearranged itself around him. The shop was eleven feet wide and smelled like green soap, cheap coffee, and the lemon cleaner she used on everything. He'd walked in and made it smell like rain and cedar and something sharper underneath, something hot and animal she was absolutely not going to name. Three chairs, one cracked leather sofa, one radiator that clanked like a ghost with a grudge. It had never once felt crowded. It felt crowded now. She took a surgical marker from the tray and bent over him, and the shop went small and quiet around her the way it always did when she started to draw. The buzzing neon faded. The rain against the window dropped to a murmur. There was only skin, the shape of the wound, and the shape of the thing that wanted to grow over it. She saw it before her hand moved: thorn vines, thick at the base and thinning to wire, curling around the s***h like a fence around something dangerous. She drew without a stencil, because she never did. Wren called it showing off. Mara called it the only part of her life that went where she told it to. "You hum," he said. "I don't." "You're doing it now." "It's a concentration hum. It's very professional." She tilted her head to check the curve. "Hold still. Your ribs keep moving." "They tend to, when I'm breathing." "Stop it." "I'll consider it." She huffed, and he looked, for one fleeting second, almost entertained. Then the second ended and his face closed back into a locked door. Interesting, Mara thought, the way you think about a dog with sharp teeth. Don't pet it. The stencil of thorns took shape under her marker. When she was satisfied, she wiped her hands, pulled the machine off its hook, and dipped the needle in black. "Last chance to leave," she said. "I'm not the one hesitating." "Most people swear around the third pass." "I'm not most people." "No." She flicked the machine on and let it snarl. "Most people are polite." She lowered the needle. The first pass was always the worst for her, never for the client. It was the moment before she knew whether the ink would sit right. This ink did more than sit. It drank. The black seemed to pull itself into his skin, eager and greedy, and the grey edges of the wound drew back from the line of the needle like they'd been burned. Her fingers tingled. Her whole arm tingled, a faint, bright hum under the skin, like a struck wire. "Does that hurt?" she asked, because she couldn't think of anything else to say. "No." His voice dropped, rough. "It doesn't." His breath hitched. A muscle jumped in his jaw. His hand, the one on the armrest, had closed around the vinyl hard enough to crease it. Mara kept working. She told herself it was normal. People reacted to ink in all kinds of ways. She had once tattooed a three-hundred-pound man who cried over a dandelion. The thorns grew along his side, one stroke after another. She added leaves, small and sharp. She added a rose at the end of one vine, closed like a fist, because nothing about this man said open. With each line the wound shrank, the grey draining out of his skin, the edges knitting together under her hands. She'd never seen anything like it. She was fairly sure she wasn't supposed to be seeing it now. "Tell me if it stings," she said, although her own voice sounded far away. "It's not stinging." He swallowed. "It's pulling." "Pulling what?" He didn't answer. His eyes had gone fully gold, bright as lamps, fixed on her face. She should have been afraid of that. She was, a little. But her hands didn't shake, because the design was almost done, and she never left a piece unfinished. She laid down the last curve of the last vine and lifted the needle. The wound was gone. Not hidden. Gone. Where silver should have rotted him there was smooth, healed skin, and over it, her thorns lay black and perfect, a little raised, still bright with ink. And along the length of the middle vine, woven through the black like a strand of wire, ran a thin gold line. It glowed. It pulsed once, slow, in time with a heartbeat that didn't belong to her. Mara's own wrist, under her glove, gave a warm, answering throb. "Okay," she whispered. "That's new." His hand shot out and closed around her arm, fast enough that she didn't see it move. His grip wasn't painful. It was careful, the way you hold something you've just realized might break. His thumb pressed down against the inside of her wrist, directly over the pulse. She felt the gold line in his side flare in answer. "Don't," he said, very softly. "Don't what? You grabbed me." "Don't lie to me." His voice had lost its edge. Somehow it was worse. It was low and bare and almost frightened, and she realized with a lurch that he wasn't threatening her. He was asking something he didn't want the answer to. He leaned forward in the chair until the neon turned the gold in his eyes to flame. "Who sent you?"