Chapter 4
FOUR
MAYA
It had been three days since my brother came to see me, and I was still shaken by it.
I kept looking over my shoulder and out the window of my apartment above my shop, wondering if someone was watching.
Stalking me and following me. I hated it.
I hated every bit of it. That feeling was why I’d left China in the first place.
Why I’d left my home country at such a young age to try and make a better life for myself.
In San Diego, no one from my family was watched by that gang.
No one tried to track us down or pop in to make sure we were “doing okay.”
Which was code for “doing shit we weren’t supposed to be doing.”
I knew it was bad if my brother came to visit.
It always was. Every time my father tried to really check in with my brother and me, it meant something had gone wrong.
A vendetta had been bountied for someone’s head or the people my father rolled with had pissed off the wrong person.
I mean, I knew my father checked in on us out of sheer worry.
I knew he had bodyguards following me around as a teenager out of a sheer will to keep me safe.
But what would have also kept us safe was not getting involved with those assholes in the first place.
I knew my brother thought I was an idiot.
I knew he was under the assumption that I didn’t know what he did.
Sure, he knew I knew who he rolled with.
That he’d taken father’s place in the family business when our parents had been killed by the same people that employed him.
What he didn’t know was how I’d figured it out.
How I came about the concrete proof that solidified my want to stay hidden, no matter what.
And that was the night he came home with blood on his shirt.
I sat at the top of the steps one day after my father and my brother left.
To do “men stuff,” they’d said. Whatever the fuck that meant.
I saw the worry in my mother’s face when it first happened.
The sorrow that dripped from her features after my father and brother left the house.
She paced the house all day, cleaning and re-cleaning.
Organizing and reorganizing. She stayed up until all hours of the night waiting for them to come home.
Waiting to make sure they were okay on their “boy’s day out”.
I peeked down the stairs when they came back inside and saw my brother’s shirt splattered with dull red splotches.
It was the first fight I’d ever heard my mother and father have out loud without closed doors shutting them off from the rest of the house.
My brother argued that it was ketchup, and my father tried to calm my mother down, saying everything was okay and that nothing had happened.
But we weren’t idiots.
I knew it was blood on my brother’s shirt that night.
That night did two things. It solidified my brother’s legacy in that gang, and it gave my father fuel to send me to the U.S.
His explicit instructions were to not tell the family where I had gone.
To not call unless I was called first. My father always said he had ways of tracking me down if he had to, but I wasn’t sure what they were.
There was a lot I wasn’t sure about in my life.
About my childhood. About the legacy of my family.
However, when my brother Harry showed up in San Diego a year ago, I knew my father was right.
The gang had ways of finding me if they needed to find me.
And I didn’t like that.
I talked myself in circles. For the past two days, I’d argued I was safe and argued I wasn’t.
I convinced myself things were good before talking my own self out of it.
I was about to go insane, really. The only thing that gave me focus was my work.
Piercing skin and blurring the lines between artistic canvases and the human body.
It was the only thing that kept me rooted.
Planted. Sketching and tattooing were the only things in my life that had become untainted by anything salacious. Or desperate. Or disgusting.
Or bloody.
“Hey! Someone here workin’!?”
The slurred words pulled me from my trance, and I peeked out of my office.
“Welcome to Siren’s Tattoo Shop. How may I—”
“Dude, you should get a penis,” one of the guys said.
“And make the balls boobs!” another exclaimed.
I smelled the alcohol seeping off their bodies before I crossed the threshold into the main waiting area.
Thank fuck no one was there. Because whenever drunken assholes came into my shop, it always scared the legitimate customers.
Yes, it wasn’t very smart for me to have my tattoo shop on the same strip as three of the most notorious and packed clubs in San Diego, but it drove a great deal of business.
I just had to chase out the drunkards sometimes.
“There’s a ‘no drunk’ and ‘no high’ policy in here, boys,” I said.
They all turned their heads toward me, their eyes glassed over from the booze in their stomachs.
“Please tell me she’s the one tattooing your cock and boobs,” one of the boys said.
“I’m not tattooing anything of the sort. So, I’d appreciate it—as the owner of this shop—if you’d leave,” I said.
The man in the middle’s eyes cased me. Ran up and down my body as if I were a slab of meat for him to behold.
I sucked air through my teeth and sighed and then walked over and opened the front door for them.
I was three seconds away from pulling my gun and telling them to get the fuck out.
I was already on edge from my brother’s visit.
I didn’t need another reason for this shop to be in danger.
“Out. Now,” I said.
“What a bitch,” one of them murmured.
“We’ll come back later. Maybe for some real tits. Unlike the mosquito bites you have,” another said.
“She’s as thin as a fucking rail. Eat a damn cheeseburger!”
I slammed the door behind them, hearing one of them yelp.
Good. I’d caught one of them in the ass.
He slammed his fist on the door, and all I did was roll my eyes.
The police would pick them up soon enough.
They always did. The police around here were good to my shop.
Hell, good to this entire block. They kept it as safe as they could, and I never saw a drunkard or someone who was high in my shop twice.
I knew it would be the same for those asshats.
I sighed and walked back to my office. The sun had begun to set, which meant I only had two or three more hours to be open.
I didn’t have anyone on the schedule, which was how it went for a random Thursday.
I sat down and continued filling out paperwork, ordering more needles and colors and replacing some equipment.
I dove headfirst into the mound of work I had to do, typing and looking up numbers in a reference catalog.
Then, the bell over the door rang out again.
“I swear to heaven on high, if that’s them—”
“Anyone here?”
A smooth voice resonated down the hallway, and I froze. An actual customer? The man didn’t sound like most of the customers I got. Mine were pretty stereotypical, if I was being honest. I stood up and made my way down the hallway, bracing myself for whatever was coming.
And when I opened the door to the main waiting room, I froze at the sight of the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
“You the tattoo artist at this shop?” he asked.
I paused. “Welcome to Siren’s. How may I help you?”
“I’m looking for someone who can do a tattoo on my arm. Already got it drawn up. You got time?”
“Depends on the piece,” I said.
He pulled a folded-up piece of paper from his back pocket.
I walked over and took it from him, my eyes flickering up to his.
I was used to being able to get a read on people.
Looking into their eyes and, within seconds, figuring out if they were serious or not.
But the baby blue nature of his stare gave off a mischievous glance I wouldn’t have associated with someone who looked like him.
Milky pale skin. Dark brown hair. Tall. Very, very tall.
I easily stared at his chest, and one look at the veins in his neck told me his lanky form held cut muscle underneath that genuine leather.
I didn’t know if he was being serious or not just yet.
I folded open the piece of paper and was shocked by the detail in the picture.
It was a tree of life tattoo with a leafless, shaded black tree reflected perfectly in a lake.
The sky and the clouds were shaded around it, wrapping around his shoulder and covering his arm to just above his elbow.
There were dark hills with a moonlit sky in the background, giving it an ominous feel that still felt beautiful.
And just as confusing as the man looming in front of me.
“This’ll have to be taken in steps. Phases. Outlining, then coloring, then shading,” I said.
“Even if it’s only three distinct colors?” the man asked.
I fluttered my eyes up to meet his. “If I stayed open for another hour, we could do outlining and coloring in this sit-down. But shading would still have to be for another time. And yes, that would cost you greatly in terms of money.”
“Fine by me. I got the money.”
My eyes danced over the man, taking in his smaller features.
Like the scar that broke up his left eyebrow or the way one eye didn’t quite open as much as the other.
He had a scar donning his lower lip, piercing through the fullness of it.
He had stubble on his face—the growing of dark red stubble despite the brown hair on top of his head.
His chest swelled with natural pride before dropping into a tapered waist his shirt clung to, leaving my eyes to trail along his long legs.
“Like what you see?” he asked.
Even if I did, I couldn’t afford to. I had plans.
A need to survive. I had plans to hide away forever once I could stash away enough money.
I owned this small building—a building with a studio apartment overhead that was disconnected from the strip but still stood proud among the restaurants and the clubs.
Ten more years of working and then I’d sell this place off and move somewhere cheap.
Somewhere rustic. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
I’d build a life outside of my past until I had to take a part-time job in a grocery store somewhere to cushion my investments.
I looked up just in time to watch him lick his lips, and I scoffed.
“Let me get this sketched up on outline paper and we’ll get you started,” I said.
“You don’t want to sit down and talk for a bit? Figure out why I want this tattoo?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Not necessary. I’m not your therapist. Just your neighborhood tattoo artist.”
“Then, I should take a little neighborly time and figure out why you decided to move to the area.”
I walked behind the register counter and pulled out some outline paper. I smoothed his folded piece of paper out and began sketching it. I felt him approach me. Loom his shadow over me and watch. But when I felt him move off to the side to come around to where I was, I paused.
I whipped my head over to him and locked my eyes with his.
“I’ll tattoo a shoulder-sized cock on your arm if you don’t stay in front of me,” I said.
The man grinned. “What if that’s the kind of foreplay I enjoy?”
“Then, I’d tell you that you were flirting with the wrong gender.”
“I could be bisexual. You never know. You haven’t even asked me my name.”
“Is that important information for giving you this tattoo?”
He chuckled. “I’m Notch.”
My eyes fell down his body one more time before my hand started sketching again. Before my eyes fell back to the piece of outline paper I was working with.
And I found it hard to bury the grin trying to slide across my cheeks.