Chapter 4
ONYX
I’d been standing in my booth for the past twenty minutes pretending to be focused on reorganizing supplies, but my eyes kept drifting to Elena. Couldn’t help it. Every time I glanced over at her, that slow burn in my gut flared hot again.
She was in the same damn spot she always claimed during her downtime, the corner chair by the wall, her sketchbook balanced on her lap, and her pencil moving in precise, measured strokes. Her focus didn’t waver. Not once. The rest of the studio might as well not have existed.
From my angle, I could just make out part of the page.
It was the same sketch I’d seen her working on yesterday.
Or at least it started that way. She’d already replicated it once, perfectly.
Now she was taking it apart layer by layer, reshaping and adjusting.
Her pencil moved with purpose, altering the line weight in one section, then flipping the page to work a variation with a slightly different hierarchy.
This wasn’t creative exploration. Or trial and error. This was a dissection.
I watched the way her brow furrowed slightly with each new variation. She wasn’t doodling. She was solving something.
And I felt that familiar itch at the base of my skull.
That symbol had been bothering me for days. Not because it was familiar in the artistic sense. I’d seen a thousand different tattoos and decorative insignia over the years. But this one kept tugging at something in the back of my mind. Something older. Darker.
When my next client came in, I forced myself to snap out of it and get my shit together.
The guy wanted a patch-up and extension to a geometric piece on his back.
It took a couple of hours to get him cleaned, prepped, and inked, but my body was running on muscle memory the whole time.
I still nailed it, but my brain wasn’t there. Not fully.
Not with Elena in the room. Not with those sketches on her lap.
After he left, I stripped off my gloves and dumped the waste in the bin, then turned and let myself drift toward her, my steps casual. No urgency in my walk. Just enough weight in my stride so she felt me coming before she heard me.
I stopped a few feet back, my arms folded and eyes on the page in front of her.
She didn’t look up immediately, too focused on the curve she was adjusting.
The page was covered in versions of the same symbol.
Adjustments so subtle I doubted anyone else would’ve noticed unless they had experience decoding structure in ink, which I did.
Tattooing trains your eye. You learned to recognize intent. It wasn’t just about lines but what lived inside them—pressure, rhythm, and spacing.
Ink could tell you whether a design was done by a nervous hand or a confident one. I could tell you whether the lines carried purpose or were hiding something.
And what Elena was sketching didn’t look like a logo or a design pulled from some random Pinterest board.
It looked like a code.
Then it clicked in my head.
I’d seen that symbol before.
Not exactly, but close. Variants. Flipped orientation, different center weight, and sometimes with an extra notch or stroke added.
She wasn’t drawing art pieces.
They were fucking identifiers.
Syndicate marks.
The kind we’d encountered on bodies or walls during past conflicts with organized networks. Criminal groups that operated in the shadows with their own languages and their own hierarchy of symbols and signals.
This wasn’t speculation. It was a fact.
And she was drawing them with the kind of instinct that didn’t come from chance.
She stared at the page like the answers were hiding beneath the surface, and she was trying to coax them out.
I forced myself to speak, my tone low and even. “Where’d you find that symbol?”
Elena jumped slightly, startled. She blinked up at me with wide eyes, then relaxed when she saw it was just me. That softening when she looked at me hit harder than I wanted to admit.
“You scared the crap out of me, Onyx.” She shook her head with a small laugh. “I didn’t even realize you were there.”
I frowned, distracted from her art by the sound of my road name on her lips. It was wrong.
“Reeve,” I grunted.
She cocked her head to the side and stared at me curiously. “Reeve?”
“It’s my name. Not Onyx.”
“Oh, I thought…”
“Everyone else calls me Onyx. You don’t.”
She double blinked, then a pretty blush bloomed on her cheeks. “Okay. Um…Reeve. What did you ask—oh! Right!” She glanced down at her sketchbook, then back at me. “It was part of an exercise. My mentor gave me a photo of a damaged engraving. Said it was good for pattern reconstruction work.”
I crouched slightly, resting my forearm on the table beside her and keeping my voice neutral. “You’re doing more than reconstructing.”
She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“You’re building out the language. The structure. These aren’t just variations. They’re weighted. Layered. You’re working through what matters more, the vertical line or the nested hook on the right.”
She blinked. “I mean…yeah. I guess I am. It just felt like something was missing, so I kept adjusting.”
“You ever see this symbol before that photo?”
Her lips parted slightly, then closed again. She shook her head. “No. That was the first time.”
“And your mentor gave it to you?”
“Yes. Jareth sometimes gives me advanced sketch exercises. Partial images. Things like this to practice with.”
My gut tightened.
Too much knowledge wrapped in an innocent package.
Elena wasn’t doing anything wrong. That much was clear. She didn’t know what she was playing with. Her abilities were being specifically honed for this work without her knowledge.
But the motherfucker feeding her these scraps knew exactly what he was doing.
I straightened slowly. “It’s very intriguing. You mind if I take a photo of that one?”
She looked surprised and hesitated. “Um…he doesn’t like copies of my art stored anywhere but in my head.”
“I get it,” I lied, not mentioning how absurd that was.
Elena chewed her lip, looking torn. I knew she was flattered that I would want a picture of her art, but she didn’t want to disappoint her mentor.
An idea popped into my head. “You were working on a sketch for a tattoo the other day. A—”
“Oh!” Her face lit up, and she shuffled through the pages of her sketchbook, one finger keeping her place on the page of her current project. Then she pulled one out and held it up, letting the book fall back open to her current sketch. “This one?”
“That’s it.” I nodded with a smile. “Mind if I take a photo of that one instead?”
She blushed. “Sure.”
I pulled out my phone and carefully tilted it to snap a clear shot of the amazing artwork she was holding up, while still capturing a view of the symbol on the open page of her sketchbook.
Even as background, her sketch was precise enough to match any database we had.
“Thanks.”
She smiled again. “You’re welcome.”
I walked away, forcing my steps to stay even while my mind raced.
Immediately heading toward the rear entrance, I shot a picture of Wizard, one of my brothers. Then I slipped outside, crossed the lot, and called him, knowing he was the one guy who could get me the information I needed because he was a tech genius.
“Yo.” Wizard’s voice came through with zero preamble.
“Got a symbol for you. Need you to run it through anything that isn’t public facing. Go deep. Looking for syndicate ties, not aesthetic matches.”
He grunted. “You saying this came from an active job?”
“No. From Elena.”
There was silence, then a muttered, “Fuck.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll call you back when I have something.”
It didn’t take long.
An hour later, I was in the lounge at the club, sitting at the long counter with a beer in one hand and my boots propped on a stool. Wizard stalked in with his phone in hand and an annoyed look on his face.
He didn’t say anything at first. Just dropped his phone on the bar, screen lit up with the symbol. Then he tapped twice, and another image came up—an old scan from a surveillance case we’d done recently. Nearly identical.
“This is active. Syndicate tier-two. Not decorative. These aren’t artistic embellishments. They’re code modifications for rank structure.”
“Fuck me,” I muttered.
“These don’t go online. They don’t float around as art inspo. You don’t find these on Reddit boards or tattoo flash sets. This shit is proprietary.”
“Someone’s feeding it to her.”
Wizard nodded slowly. “And whoever it is knows exactly what they’re doing.”
Rage simmered under my skin, low and deadly.
Elena had no idea how deep she was in.
She’d been trained to notice things most people missed, whether she realized it or not. To recreate what she saw and instinctively refine it. To build a lexicon of symbols that didn’t just look good—they meant something.
And that made her a fucking liability.
Not to us.
To them.
If anyone in those networks saw her work. If they realized what she could do with half a sketch and five minutes of silence, they wouldn’t see a tattoo apprentice. They’d see a threat.
They’d put her down without blinking.
“Whoever her mentor is—” I started.
Wizard cut in. “Needs to be checked out. I’ll start digging.”
I stood, the scrape of my chair loud in the room.
“She’s not safe.”
Wizard looked up at me, reading the decision already written all over my face.
“No, she’s not,” he agreed.
I walked out without another word.
Whatever she was mixed up in—and however deep it went—I was going to make sure she didn’t have to face any of it alone.
Not now. Not ever.
Elena Dane was under my protection.
Whether she knew it yet or not.