MARKED BY TWO RUTHLESS BIKER ALPHAS

Chapter 3 — Wrong Shop, Right Girl

The door didn't open so much as surrender.

One moment Mara was bent over the counter, sorting needle cartridges by gauge with the deadbolt firmly locked behind her. The next, the whole frame shuddered, the latch burst out of the wood in a spray of splinters, and the door swung wide enough to slam against the wall and bounce back.

A man stood in the doorway with his boot still raised.

"Knock knock," he said.

"That," said Mara, "was a hundred-dollar deadbolt."

"Then it should've been better at its job." He lowered his boot, stepped over the wreckage, and let the rain follow him in like an unruly dog. He was tall in a loose, careless way, as if his bones hadn't been told to stand up straight. Dark blond hair, wet and tangled. A split lip healing slowly at the corner. A black leather jacket with a patch on the shoulder, a silver-grey wolf's head on a ring of ash, and a grin that had clearly gotten him out of worse trouble than this. He smelled like whiskey and engine oil and wet pavement. Under the whiskey, his eyes were disturbingly clear.

Mara closed her hand around the nearest object, which was a bottle of green soap. It didn't make her feel better.

"We're closed."

"Door says otherwise." He waved a hand at the splintered frame. "Doesn't say anything, really. Very quiet door."

"You broke it."

"I liberated it." He swept his gaze over the shop in one lazy circle: the flash walls, the gummy-bear jar by the register, the cracked leather sofa, the chair. His eyes snagged on the chair and stayed there, just a beat too long. The grin shifted into something sharper. "Cute place. Cozy. I'm looking for the girl who inked Draven."

Her stomach dropped. She kept her face still, which took everything she had. "Never heard of him."

"Liar."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm not mad about it. You're very bad at it, and I find that charming." He wandered closer, hands in his pockets, in no hurry at all, until he was near enough that she could see a small scar through his left eyebrow. He tilted his head. Then, with the unselfconscious ease of a dog at a fence, he leaned in and sniffed the air beside her shoulder.

"What are you doing?"

"Cedar. Gun oil. Bad attitude." He straightened, delighted. "Your hands smell like Kane Draven. You've had your hands on him, sweetheart, and recently, and I'd bet the bike on it."

Heat climbed Mara's face, which made it worse. "I tattooed a man. That's my job. Hands are a recurring feature."

"A tall man. Bad posture, worse manners, glares like his face is billing you for it?"

"Tall, yes. The rest sounds like most of the city."

Jax laughed. It was a real laugh, loud and bright and a little rusty, like he didn't use it often enough. "Okay. I like you. I wasn't going to." He dropped onto the cracked leather sofa without being asked, sprawled across it with his boots on the cushions, and helped himself to a fistful of gummy bears from the jar. "Jax Voss, by the way. Pleased to be your mistake."

"Is Jax short for something?"

"Jackass, according to Kane."

"I'm starting to see his point."

"Everyone does eventually." He popped a gummy bear in his mouth and chewed with enormous satisfaction. "So here's the thing. Rook, that's my guy, he's been parked outside your window all day because some very interesting rumor reached my ears. Draven walked into his clubhouse with a brand-new tattoo and a face like he'd just seen God. Now, I've known Kane for ten years. The man doesn't flinch. He doesn't wonder. He's got the emotional range of a locked safe." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and for a moment the grin dimmed to something quiet and appraising. "And since then he's spent twenty minutes at a time staring at his own ribs like they owed him money. What did you do to him?"

"I covered a scar."

"Kane doesn't have scars. He has enemies who've learned better."

"Well, he had one, and now he has thorns." She crossed her arms. "I'm sorry you came all this way to be disappointed. Take a gummy bear for the road. Several. They're on the house, along with the locksmith bill."

Jax didn't move. He chewed, and swallowed, and looked at her with a stillness she didn't like at all. It was the stillness she'd seen in Kane's face when he'd asked who sent her: a man standing very close to an edge and pretending it was a hill.

"Look," he said, quieter, "I'm not here to hurt you. If I were here to hurt you, you'd have known it before the door fell. I'm just curious, which is worse, I'll admit. I'd like to see the work."

"It's on Kane. Ask him."

"I'd rather eat my own boot."

"I could arrange that."

"See, you're funny." He grinned, and then, without any warning, he rose and crossed the room and dropped into her tattoo chair, long legs thrown out in front of him, arms flung wide as if the chair had been waiting for him all its life. "So give me one."

"Absolutely not."

"A small one. A very tasteful one. I'll pay triple."

Mara stared. "Why does everyone think triple is a magic word?"

"Because it works?"

"You want a tattoo from the same artist as your worst enemy. You do hear how that sounds."

"I hear how it sounds." His mouth quirked. "I'm still not leaving."

She looked at him: the long sprawl, the stubborn jaw, the faint tremor in his left hand that he'd tucked under his thigh. Under the whiskey and the nonsense he was tired. Hurt, too, though she couldn't tell where. She thought about Wren upstairs, and the broken door, and a man in a helmet who'd watched her all morning. She thought about Kane's low voice saying if that gold shows up again, you don't touch it.

There was no gold now. There was just a scruffy man who wanted to be annoying in her chair.

One tiny line, she told herself. Black ink. Ten seconds. Then he leaves, and I call a locksmith, and I pretend this entire week was a bad sandwich.

"Wrist," she said, grabbing a fresh needle. "Inside. And if you move, I'll be forced to draw a p***s on you, and I'll do it beautifully."

"I would expect nothing less."

She snapped on gloves. He held out his forearm, palm up, and she took his wrist in her hand. His skin was warm. Warmer than a human's should be, with a pulse that thudded slow and strong beneath her thumb. Up close she could see old white scars crossing his knuckles, a callus where a throttle had worn his palm smooth. She marked a spot with the surgical pen and sketched a single thorn, small as her fingernail, curved like a claw.

"You draw without a stencil," Jax said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I can." She didn't look up. "Because stencils are for people who don't trust their hands."

"Do you trust yours?"

The question was too quiet to be a joke. Mara's pen paused. "Most days," she said. "Hold still."

He held still. She switched on the machine.

The needle kissed his skin, and the world dropped out from under her.

It was nothing like the first time. It was more. The tingle in her fingers climbed to her elbow, then her shoulder, then settled somewhere behind her ribs and pulled, hard, like someone had hooked her sternum and given it a long, slow tug. Jax's breath caught. His eyes flew open. The hand in hers went rigid, then turned over, impossibly, so his palm gripped her wrist as hard as she gripped his.

"Mara," he said. She had never told him her name.

Gold light bloomed under the black thorn. It spread outward in a slow, glowing thread, up his forearm, vein by vein, like a river finding its channel. It was brilliant, almost too bright to look at, and it threw their shadows huge and wavering across the flash walls.

"That's not supposed to happen," Jax whispered. The grin was gone. He looked at her the way you'd look at a house you'd lived in your whole life if it suddenly sprouted a door.

"I know," said Mara.

"Is that—" He swallowed. "Is that yours?"

"I don't know what it is."

Then it came, from very far away.

It hit her from behind the sternum like the second ring of a bell, deeper than the first, ripping through the thin gold line that had been quiet in her own wrist ever since the first thorn. She felt it as clearly as a hand on her shoulder. Someone, somewhere in the city, had just been wrenched to his feet by the other end of the thread.

And they were furious.