Chapter 6 #2
She heard her own breathing in the pause.
Felt the wall against her shoulder blades.
“The brother I knew is not the man from the news. Not the shooter of a young girl. He was my brother. He was annoying and brilliant. He made terrible coffee and he believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. He was a real person.”
She turned her head, hoping she was making Sebastian see Penn the way she had.
He was watching the tree line, but his jaw was tight. “Stubborn must run in the family.”
The words landed softly. She blinked. For a second, she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. Then she saw the faintest crease at the corner of his mouth—not a smile, but the suggestion of one, offered with caution as if carrying something fragile across a distance he wasn’t sure he could bridge.
A sound escaped her—half laugh, half exhale, surprised out of her before she could stop it. “Did you just call me stubborn?”
“I made an observation about hereditary traits. Completely different.”
She shook her head. The grief was still there—it was too big to move—but something loosened inside her chest. Not the pain itself, but some of the pressure around it. Like someone had cracked a window in a room that had been sealed too long.
They stood in the cold for another minute. The hawk drifted east. The mountains held their positions.
“Ready to go back in?” he asked.
She wasn’t. She nodded anyway.
The scans were complete—every page, every margin note, every iteration of the organization’s tattoo design captured in high resolution and logged with timestamps.
Jasper was already organizing the files into a database structure that would let Claire’s team cross-reference the initials and dates against the Inkwell file.
“I’ll be in touch,” Claire said to Sutton on her way out a few minutes later. Her tone was measured, but her eyes held a focus that hadn’t been there earlier. “Thank you for doing this. I know it wasn’t easy.”
Sutton didn’t trust her voice, so she just nodded.
Sebastian gathered the sketchbooks carefully before he walked her back to her room.
At the door, she expected him to leave—post up in the hallway, disappear into the compound, do whatever operators did when the day’s work was done.
Instead, he stood in the doorway and handed them to her.
When she sat cross-legged on the bed and opened the first sketchbook, he didn’t move.
She turned pages. Not for evidence this time. For Penn. Halfway through the second book, she found it—a full-page illustration she loved of a phoenix, rendered in Penn’s boldest style, rising from a tangle of broken chains.
The linework was aggressive, almost angry, but the bird itself was beautiful—wings spread, feathers drawn with a delicacy that contradicted the violence of the composition.
Fire licked the edges. The chains dissolved into ash at the bottom of the page.
There was so much detail that the bird seemed nearly 3-D.
In the lower right corner, Penn had written a single word: Free. “This one,” she said.
Sebastian stepped into the room. He studied it with full attention, nothing dismissed, nothing assumed. “It’s good,” he said.
“It’s better than good. Look at the chains.
” She traced the shapes with her finger.
“The links aren’t round. They’re angular.
The same angles he used in some of his tattoo work—but here it’s being destroyed.
The phoenix is breaking out of the design.
He’s the bird, freeing himself from his own structures.
” Her voice caught. “He drew this during his last year at his studio in D.C. I was home from Corcoran for Thanksgiving. He showed it to me and claimed it was the best thing he’d ever done. ”
“Did he get it inked on himself?”
She shook her head. “Not all art is for skin.” She closed the book and held it against her with both hands.
“He knew the difference between what he made for clients and what he made for himself. Between the work that paid the bills and the work that meant something. He just—he couldn’t figure out how to make this kind of art pay, so he kept taking clients, kept doing flash, kept saying yes to whoever walked in the door.
” She paused. “I guess one of those people was the wrong person.”
Sebastian leaned against the doorframe, none of the tension she’d come to associate with his guarded posture evident now. “Your ink,” he said. “The piece on your shoulder. That’s Penn’s work?”
Of course he’d noticed—he noticed everything, that was his whole thing. He was the lynx who spotted what others missed.
But the fact that he’d noticed the tattoo on her shoulder blade and identified it as different from the ones she’d done herself made her look at him differently.
“He designed it,” she said. “Inked it himself on my eighteenth birthday. It was the week after I got my acceptance letter from Corcoran. He said every artist needed a rite of passage, and since I wouldn’t let him take me skydiving, this was the next best thing.”
She smiled, remembering. “It took hours. He played Bowie the entire time. I wasn’t allowed to see it until it was done. When he finally let me look in the mirror, I cried.”
“It’s well done.”
It was beautiful, the crescent moon caught in branches like it had fallen from the sky and the trees caught it. Her voice thinned. “He said—he said, ‘The world’s going to try to take everything from you, Sut. Your time, your talent, your nerve. Don’t let it. Hold on to the beautiful things.’”
The tears came before she could stop them. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
She heard Sebastian move into the room, and then the mattress dipped. He sat on the edge of the bed beside her, a gentle hand settling on the inked shoulder. The heat of his palm soaked through the thin fabric of the thermal.
He didn’t say it was going to be okay or that he was sorry. He put his hand on the place where her brother had left his mark and held it there while she cried, his palm an anchor in a current that had been pulling her under for six years.
She wanted to lean into him, but that felt like a betrayal of her brother. Such a simple act that could be construed as forgiveness.
So she sat with Penn’s sketchbook in her lap and Sebastian’s hand on her back while she let the tears come.
After a minute, Sebastian got up and brought her a box of tissues from the bathroom. She wiped her face, hating herself for crying in front of him. As the wave of grief subsided, her eyes felt swollen, and her nose was running. She was fairly sure she looked like absolute hell.
“Thank you,” she said. “For letting me keep them.”
He nodded and moved to the door. There he paused. “The phoenix is good, but the ink on your shoulder is better.”
He closed the door. Sutton sat on the bed, feeling his absence, and breathed.