Chapter Nine
She'd been designing the piece in her head for three days.
Not consciously—not sitting at her station with a sketchpad, working through iterations the way she did with client work.
This was the other kind of designing, the kind that happened underneath, where her brain mapped skin the way Levee mapped buildings.
Subconscious architecture. The lines appeared when she wasn't looking for them, surfacing during conversations and meals and the quiet hours after the compound went dark.
A piece for his left hand. For the scar.
She'd been staring at it since the welding shop—that pale line crossing his palm where the cable had sheared, the mark of nine years' worth of building things that held.
Every time he picked up a rifle or turned a wrench or wrapped his fingers around a coffee mug, she saw it.
And every time she saw it, the design got sharper.
Now she was sitting on the workbench in the armory, watching him reassemble the shotgun he'd been maintaining, and the design was finished. Complete. Ready to go from her head to his skin.
"I want to tattoo you," she said.
His hands stilled on the barrel. He didn't look up.
"The scar," she continued. "I've been designing something for it. Have been since—" She stopped. Since the welding shop? Since the first night in his armory? Since two years ago when he'd sat in her chair and told her he wasn't ready?
"Since before I knew I was designing it," she finished.
Now he looked up. Those steady eyes found hers, and she saw the question in them—not what but why.
"You came into my shop two years ago," she said. "Sat in my chair for ten minutes without talking. Asked about covering the scar, then told me you weren't ready and walked out." She held his gaze. "You're ready now."
It wasn't a question. She was done asking this man questions when she already knew the answers.
Levee set the shotgun down with the same care he gave everything—precise, deliberate, like the weapon deserved respect even when he was walking away from it. He stood, and the armory felt smaller with him at full height, those heavy shoulders blocking the overhead light.
"Where?" he asked.
"Common room. My chair. My station." She slid off the workbench. "I do my best work in my own space."
The common room was empty.
Eleven PM on a Thursday, and the brothers had cleared out hours ago—drifting to their rooms or the back porch or wherever bikers went when the night got quiet. Megan's station was still set up from the afternoon's work, her chair positioned near the window where the light was best during the day.
She flipped on the overhead and started her setup routine. Fresh needles. Clean tubes. The particular arrangement of ink caps and paper towels and petroleum jelly that was as personal as a signature—every artist had their own layout, and hers hadn't changed in twelve years.
Levee settled into the chair without being told. The leather creaked under his weight.
"Shirt off," she said.
He pulled his cut off first—folding it with a reverence that told her everything about what that leather meant to him—and set it on the table beside the chair. Then the shirt, pulled over his head in one motion, and Megan's hands went still over her ink caps.
She'd seen shirtless men in her chair a thousand times. Literally a thousand—she'd counted, once, during a slow week in Memphis. Bodies were her medium. She assessed them the way a sculptor assessed marble: for grain, for structure, for what the surface would accept.
But she hadn't assessed Levee before. Not like this.
He was built heavy through the shoulders and chest, the dense, functional muscle of a man who'd spent years doing physical labor, not gym work.
Sun-dark skin over solid architecture. Scars she hadn't cataloged yet—a puckered circle on his right shoulder that looked like a rivet burn, a thin white line along his ribs, the accumulated damage of a man who worked with his hands in dangerous conditions.
And ink. Not much—a faded piece on his upper arm that looked like Corps work, the kind of simple design military men got in their twenties and stopped thinking about. His skin was largely clean canvas.
The artist in her saw possibility.
The rest of her saw something else entirely.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what?"
"Like you're deciding where to start."
"I am deciding where to start." She snapped on her gloves, the latex popping against her wrists. "I'm a professional."
"Uh-huh."
She pulled her rolling stool up to the chair and took his left hand, turning it palm-up under the light.
The scar was a clean diagonal—upper left to lower right, crossing the heart line and the head line in palmistry terms, though Megan didn't believe in that bullshit.
What she believed in was the story skin told, and this scar told a specific one: a cable under tension, a sudden failure, a hand that grabbed instead of letting go.
"You held on," she said, tracing the line with her gloved finger. "When the cable sheared. You could've let go but you held on."
"Reflex. The equipment was failing. If I let go, the whole section—"
"You held on because that's what you do." She looked up at him. "You hold things together. Even when it costs you."
He was quiet.
She picked up her pen and started drawing directly on his skin—the design she'd been building for three days, finally making contact with the surface it was meant for.
A single line, following the scar but not covering it.
Running alongside it like a river beside a levee wall.
Clean, unbroken, the kind of line that meant I see this mark and I'm not hiding it. I'm building next to it.
"It's not a cover-up," she said as she worked. "I don't cover scars. Scars are structural. They're proof something held."
His fingers twitched against her palm. She steadied them with her free hand and kept drawing.
"The line runs parallel. Same path, same angle. So when you look at your hand, you see both—what broke and what was built after."
She finished the drawing and held his hand up to the light, checking the placement. Perfect. The design followed the scar's geography without mimicking it, a permanent companion to the mark that had been there for years.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Been ready for two years."
The machine hummed to life.
Megan worked the way she always worked—steady hands, total focus, the world narrowing to the point where needle met skin.
The line was simple but unforgiving; single-line work left no room for error, no shading to hide a wobble, no second passes to fix a mistake.
Every fraction of an inch had to be right the first time.
Levee didn't flinch.
Most clients moved, at least a little. Involuntary twitches, muscle tension, the body's natural response to a needle puncturing skin forty times per second. Big men were often the worst—all that mass and not enough practice sitting still for something that hurt.
But Levee's hand lay open and motionless in hers, his breathing slow and even, and the trust in that stillness made something crack open in her chest. He was giving her his hand—the hand that maintained the club's arsenal, that had built levee walls, that had kicked down her door and pulled her out of a gas-filled building—and letting her mark it permanently.
She'd put ink in a thousand bodies. She'd never felt the weight of it like this.
The line grew under her needle. Clean. True. The kind of work that would still be sharp in twenty years because the artist who put it there understood that permanent meant permanent and didn't cut corners.
"Done." She wiped the fresh ink, cleaned the skin, and held his hand up again. The line was perfect—running alongside his scar like a second story written in the same hand.
"What do you think?"
Levee looked at his palm for a long moment. Then he looked at her.
"Come here."
"I need to wrap—"
"Come here."
The tone in his voice—low, rough, stripped of the careful control he wore like armor—stopped her hands mid-reach for the bandage wrap.
She looked at him and saw what she'd been seeing for days, only now he wasn't hiding it.
Wasn't filing it away behind structural assessments and tactical observations.
He wanted her. And he was done pretending he didn't.
She peeled off her gloves.
His hands found her waist before she'd fully stood from the stool—those massive, scarred, newly inked hands pulling her forward until she was standing between his knees in her own tattoo chair.
The reversal of their usual positions—her standing, him sitting, looking up at her—shifted something fundamental in the air between them.
"You just put something permanent on me," he said, his voice rough.
"That's what I do."
"No." His hands tightened on her waist. "That's what you did for me. There's a difference."
She opened her mouth to argue—habit, reflex, the Megan Trask default of never letting a statement land without commentary—and he kissed her.
Not like the armory. The armory had been months of waiting finally breaking loose, all hunger and urgency and the desperate need to close the distance.
This was different.
This was his hands on her face, tilting her head back with the same care he'd used on every weapon he'd ever maintained.
This was his mouth on hers, slow and deliberate, tasting her like she was something he intended to learn thoroughly.
This was Levee—the man who never rushed anything, who assessed every structure before he touched it—applying that same methodical attention to her.
And it was devastating.
She made a sound against his mouth—something between a gasp and a curse—and felt him smile. Actually smile, his lips curving against hers, the rarest expression she'd ever seen on his face and she was tasting it instead of seeing it.
"Don't laugh at me," she muttered.
"Not laughing." He pulled back just enough to look at her, and his eyes were darker than she'd ever seen them. "Making a note."
"Of what?"