Chapter 6
Kieran
We're a secret for three weeks, and the secret is the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me.
The best, because it's her, and because every stolen hour is a thing I get to keep — her studio after close, the hidden cove south of the breakwater where the rocks make a windbreak nobody knows about, the long midnight rides up the coast highway with her arms around my ribs and the engine the only sound for miles.
I've never had a secret that wasn't shameful before.
Every secret I ever kept was a thing I'd done that I didn't want found out.
This is the first one that's just mine, a good thing held close because the world isn't ready for it, and I hoard it like the kid I was hoarding a smuggled pencil.
The worst, because of Theo.
I see him every day. He runs me ragged with prospect duty and I take it gladly, because every job he gives me is a thing he still trusts me to do, and every morning I look him in the eye and I am lying to him with my whole body.
The man who reached into a holding cell and pulled me out by the collar.
The man who put his name on me at the table.
I'm lying to him the way I used to lie to cops, smooth and total, and it's eating a hole in me that no amount of work fills.
"I hate this part," I tell Freya. We're at the cove, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, her head on my chest, the tide coming in slow. "Lying to him. He saved my life. I owe him everything and I'm —"
"I know." Her hand is flat over my heart. "I hate it too. He's my brother."
"So let's tell him."
She goes still against me. "Not yet."
"Freya —"
"Listen to me." She sits up, the blanket pooling at her waist, her dark hair loose and wild from the wind.
"If we tell him now, before you've got your patch, he wins.
He goes to Dominic and he says you crossed the line he drew, and he's not wrong, technically, and you lose everything.
But if you earn your patch first — if you stand in front of that table and they vote you in on your own merits, your work, your worth, before they know about us — then it's done.
It's real. He can't take a thing you earned clean.
So you earn it clean. And then we tell him.
" She cups my face. "I'm not asking you to lie because I'm ashamed.
I'm asking you to lie because I want you to have the one thing the world's been telling you you can't have your whole life.
I want you to have it free and clear. Both of you. I want both of you to be mine."
I turn my head and kiss her palm. "You're terrifying when you're strategic."
"I'm a tattoo artist. We plan in permanent ink. Reversibility isn't really our thing."
I laugh, and she smiles against my shoulder, and the tide comes in, and for a little while the secret is only the best thing and none of the worst.
The three weeks are made of stolen hours, and I learn to live inside them the way I once learned to live inside a cell — by making the small space enormous, by paying such fierce attention that a single hour stretches into something you could survive a month on.
There are the rides. That's how it starts most nights — me texting her a single word, cove or coast or just out, and her texting back a time, and then the long dark highway north with her arms wrapped around my ribs and her chin hooked over my shoulder, the two of us not speaking because the wind takes everything anyway, just the engine and the road and the lights of the boardwalk falling away behind us.
She holds on tight on the curves and looser on the straights, and I've started reading the road by the pressure of her hands the way I read a face, and somewhere around the third week I realize I've memorized her grip the way I memorized her hands before I ever got to draw them.
We stop at a turnout above the water where there's nothing but rock and dark and the slow strobe of the lighthouse twelve miles down the coast, and she leans against the bike and I stand between her knees and we talk about nothing — the client who cried, the design she can't crack, the brother who won't look at her — and it's the best nothing I've ever had.
There are the after-hours. The studio above Black Tide Ink with the lamp burning low, where she's started, finally, to teach me on skin — pig skin and synthetic at first, then her own thigh, a tiny dot of black she let me put in just to feel what it's like to be the one holding the machine while someone trusts you with their body.
My hand shook so badly I almost ruined it.
She held still and laughed and said, Breathe, prospect, I've had worse from men who do this for a living, and the dot is still there, just above her knee, the first mark I ever made that mattered, and every time I see it I have to sit down.
And there's the lying. That never gets easier.
I'd thought it might — I've lied my whole life, I'm good at it, lying used to be a survival skill as automatic as breathing.
But this is different, because Theo isn't a cop or a mark or a man trying to do me harm.
Theo is the hand that came into the dark and pulled me out.
He runs me ragged and I take it gladly, and one morning he sends me up to the boardwalk to drop off a part for the marina office, three doors down from Freya's shop, and I stand on the sidewalk with the part in my hands and her name on the window in front of me and I can't go in and I can't walk away, and Theo's voice on the phone says, You lost?
It's three doors down, and I say, No, on it, and I deliver the part to the marina office and I do not go into Black Tide Ink, and the not-going-in is the loudest thing I do all week.
The near-miss comes on a Sunday.
We've gotten careless — not reckless, just careless the way happy people get, the way you stop checking your mirrors when the road's been empty long enough.
Freya's closed the shop early and we're upstairs in the studio in the middle of the afternoon, which we never do, daylight is for the world and we belong to the dark, but it's a gray drizzling Sunday and the boardwalk's deserted and we've gotten greedy.
I'm sketching her — she's reading by the window, sock feet up on the sill, and I'm three pages into the best work I've done all month — when a fist hits the downstairs door.
We both freeze.
"Freya. It's me. You up there?" Theo. His voice carries straight up the stairwell. "I brought lunch. Open the door, I'm getting rained on."
I am off the couch and across the room before I've finished thinking about it, gathering my jacket and my boots and the sketchbook, and Freya's already moving too, fast and silent, pointing me at the back stairs — the fire stairs, the ones that drop down the alley side.
She mouths go and I go, soundless, the way Vane Street taught me to move through a building I'm not supposed to be in, and I'm three steps down the cold iron stairs when I hear her open the front door and say, easy as anything, You couldn't text?
I'm not decent for company, I was painting, and Theo says something I don't catch and laughs, actually laughs, the first laugh I've heard out of him in weeks, and I stand on the fire stairs in the drizzle with my heart going like a hammer and I understand exactly what I'm doing to him.
He came to bring his sister lunch on a gray Sunday. He laughed at the door. And I'm hiding in the rain on the back stairs so he won't find out that the prospect he saved is the thing standing between him and his own sister.
I ride back to the compound soaked to the skin and I scrub the bays until my hands bleed and it doesn't help, because the thing eating me isn't in my hands.
"You earn the patch," Freya tells me that night, on the phone, when I tell her I almost called the whole thing off on the fire stairs.
"You earn it clean, and then it's over, and we tell him, and you never hide on a back staircase again.
A few more weeks. That's all. You've waited your whole life for something good — you can wait a few more weeks to have it free and clear. "
"And if I can't make myself lie to him one more morning?"
A pause on the line. "Then we'll deal with that when it comes. But not tonight. Tonight you go to sleep, and tomorrow you go to work, and you let me carry the strategy, because I'm better at it than you and we both know it."
"You really are terrifying."
"I really am. Goodnight, Kieran."
She's right, and I know she's right, and it doesn't make the mornings any shorter.
But the stolen hours pile up, and each one is a thing I get to keep, and somewhere in the third week I stop being able to imagine a version of my life that goes back to before her.
The cell-wall kid, the Vane Street kid, the prospect counting days — they all funnel down to this, to a lamp in a studio and a dot of black above her knee and a woman who plans in permanent ink, and I think: whatever this costs me, it's already worth it. I paid up front. I'd pay again.
It's a Thursday when it finally happens.
We're at her studio, late, the boardwalk dark below the window.
We've been not-quite-careful for three weeks — kisses that go longer each time, hands that learn more each time, both of us drawing the moment out the way she taught me to build a gradient, pass after pass, patient, letting the dark come slow.
But tonight something's different. Tonight she locked the door and didn't say I should get you back to the compound, and she turned off all the lamps but the one over her easel, and now she's looking at me across the small honest room full of her real work, and the air's gone thick the way it gets right before a needle.
"Stay," she says. It's not a question.
"Freya."