Chapter 2
RIGGS
“If I haven’t told you lately, I fucking hate you!” Damon, my best friend, seethed at me.
I lifted the tattoo machine away from his kneecap and leaned back with a smile.
“Just the white and I’m done,” I promised.
“I don’t want highlights.” He dropped his head against the back of the chair and screwed his eyes shut. “Let it live in shadows.”
It was a flaming skull with diamonds for eyes, and it had taken four hours for me to blast the design onto Damon’s kneecap. He was swollen, miserable, and hating life. But me? I didn’t feel a thing.
“Two minutes,” I assured him, dipping the needle into some white ink and giving the pedal a tap with the toe of my boot. “You can make it for two more minutes, can’t you?”
“Don’t condescend to me like I’m one of your pretty little submissives.” Damon covered his face with his hands. “Just do it.”
“There’s nothing pretty about you,” I said, hunching over to lay the final highlights into Damon’s knee.
It took me less than two minutes, and he didn’t even thank me for being quick.
He also didn’t thank me for not dry rubbing the blood and ink off his knee, but I’d let it slide.
I rinsed Damon’s tattoo and cleaned his knee, bandaged him up and slid my stool out of the way so he could stand.
He made a valiant effort before collapsing back into the chair.
“You’re not gonna pass out on me, are you?”
“No,” he grumbled. “But I’m not sure how I’m going to get home.”
“I’d offer to let you stay here, but if you can’t stand up, you definitely can’t make it up the stairs.”
“You asshole, I don’t think I’m ever going to walk again.” He swung his legs onto the bottom of the chair and stretched his not freshly tattooed leg out. “I think I live here now. In this chair.”
“I surely fucking hope not,” I countered, wrapping and tossing the used ink caps and gloves into the trash. “I have clients tomorrow and there is a mortgage to be paid.”
“I’ll just wait it out a bit while you clean,” he said.
I stood up, grabbed a water bottle from the small fridge in the corner of my tattoo shop, and shoved it into his sweaty hands.
“Drink this,” I told him. “Slowly.”
Damon followed instructions, and I waited for some of the color to return to his face before getting back into clean up.
I sanitized my station, then swept up and cleaned the rest of the small space, humming to myself as I worked.
By the time I finished, Damon was upright with his ass in the chair and his feet on the ground. It was definitely an improvement.
“Better?” I asked, checking my pockets for my wallet and phone. My keys were on a hook by the door, along with my matte black motorcycle helmet and leather jacket.
“Are you throwing me out?”
“I…was planning to go out after we were done.”
Damo squinted his dark brown eyes at me, his earlier fatigue gone now in favor of a curious kind of question.
I squared my shoulders and waited for him to speak his piece because I knew he had one.
Damon was my best friend, and he had been for my whole adult life.
He’d been on his hands and knees with me laying the floor of my shop, and he’d been on his ass in the middle of my living room, sorting through boxes of a life cut short.
There wasn’t much about me Damon didn’t know, and I liked it that way.
He kept me sane and he kept me grounded, which I needed.
Especially these days.
“Where were you planning to go?” he asked.
Bracing my hands against the small of my back, I arched and then bowed, stretching out my spine after hours of being bent over to tattoo.
I was nowhere near as young as I’d been when I started in the trade, something that was much better designed for twenty year-old men than ones pushing forty.
But I’d dumped everything I had into this dream, and it wasn’t something I would ever walk away from.
My plan, although already long ignored, was to hire a few other artists to rent out the extra booths I’d deliberately built into the shop and let their booth rent cover the mortgage on the building.
That meant I’d be able to work less, almost like a retirement plan.
But the shop had been open for three years, and I hadn’t so much as thought about bringing anyone else in.
“Get a drink,” I said, which was a half-truth.
“I’ll go with you.”
“You’ll bleed out,” I teased.
Damon finished his drink and tossed the empty bottle into one of my trash cans.
“I don’t have to drink if you’re drinking,” he said.
“I was going to go to Rapture,” I confessed.
Damon smirked. “Planning to blow off some steam finally?”
“I was just going to get a drink and see what trouble everyone else was trying to get into.”
And that was the full truth.
There were a handful of indisputable facts about me, the first of which being that as much as I loved to make my own trouble, I also very much enjoyed watching other people get into their own.
Rapture was the perfect place for that sort of observation—a BDSM club built under the rafters of a de-sanctified church—almost always filled with sweaty and gyrating bodies on the dance floor and people in various stages of undress and pleasure scattered around the upstairs choir loft.
It was also a great place for me to find people who were chasing after their own interests because focusing on other people was the perfect distraction from ignoring myself.
“Riggs, it’s been—”
I cut my best friend off with a raised hand and a frown.
“I was just going to get a drink and see what trouble everyone else was trying to get into,” I repeated. “If you want to come, you can. If you don’t, we’ll get you home.”
Damon sighed heavily and shifted his weight to ease off the leg I’d just tattooed.
“Get me home,” he decided.
It was the right choice. His adrenaline was already heading toward the floor, and I needed my best friend to be safe on his couch before that happened.
“I’ll drive you.”
He pushed open the front door of the shop, bells chiming as the door swung open, and I flipped off the lights and gave one last scan of the dark space before joining him on the sidewalk.
After shrugging my jacket up my shoulders, I locked up and laughed as Damon hobbled around the corner to my car, and laughed even harder at him while he tried to maneuver himself into my passenger seat.
“Are you sure I can’t stay here tonight?” he asked.
“I’m sure.”
Knee tattoos definitely hurt, but if I could handle it, Damon could also handle it.
If women could do it, well…it was no secret that women always sat better for tattoos than men did.
A fact I reminded Damon of after getting into the driver’s side of my car and buckling my seatbelt.
He gave me the finger and tried to say something rude, but my phone chose that moment to connect to the Bluetooth, loud music immediately drowning him out.
It took about fifteen minutes for me to get from Silverlake to Hollywood, and ten minutes to help Damon up the stairs to his second-floor apartment. Once I dropped him on the couch, it was another thirty-five minutes to Pasadena, and I pulled into the parking lot at Rapture just shy of eleven.
I hadn’t bothered to change or spruce myself up, but my street clothes were standard enough that I wouldn’t stand out inside the club.
As usual, I had on black leather boots and black jeans, though the pair I’d put on that morning were so faded they were nearly gray.
I wore a black shirt I picked up somewhere along the way, probably merch from a band I’d seen in the past. I honestly wasn’t sure.
All that with my leather jacket, and it was a normal look for me.
Shoving my hair back from my forehead, I twisted it into a loose bun and headed toward the front doors of the club.
Rapture was a great place and an even better idea.
Landon and Verity, the owners, had kept a ton of the original building elements when they built the place up, including the stained glass and some of the pews.
I loved the vibe it created, a lot like what I’d tried to do with my place.
The building my tattoo shop and apartment were in had been built in the thirties, and when I put the offer in, it wasn’t in great shape.
I’d done as much as I could to preserve the character of the building while refreshing what I needed in order to make it modern and workable.
“Welcome to Rapture,” a slender woman at the front desk of the club said, her hand held out, palm up. “ID?”
I fished my ID out of my wallet and handed it over.
Rapture was one of the safest clubs in the area with a strict membership and guest policy.
There were background checks and rules upon rules, everything designed with the safety of members in mind.
I appreciated the thought that had gone into the whole thing.
She handed me back my ID and wished me a good night, and five steps later, the sweetest relief washed over me. Wrapped up immediately in the sound and smell of the club, I ignored everything that could serve as a distraction and headed straight for the bar.
The bartender, Callum, acknowledged me from the other end of the bar with a quick flick of his wrist, and I leaned against the bar top to wait for him to make his way down to me.
He had a beer uncapped by the time he reached me, setting it down on a white napkin and pushing it toward me.
I traded him a ten-dollar bill for the drink and turned to face the club, trying to decide where I wanted to settle in for the night.