Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Sutton
Penn’s handwriting had always been terrible.
That was the first thing Sutton thought when she opened the first sketchbook in the tech room, Jasper’s scanner humming beside her. Claire and the team were arrayed around the table like surgeons waiting for the first incision.
Penn’s penmanship had been a running joke in the Crenshaw household—their mother called it seismographic, their father called it lazy. Penn called it artistic intention.
Nobody else in this room could read it. Sutton could.
She turned the first page. Jasper scanned it—the high-resolution camera capturing every mark, every smudge. Sutton studied the design underneath, a custom piece Penn had done for a client. Geometric linework, clean execution. Nothing unusual.
She turned another page. It was scanned. Another. The room was quiet except for the click of the scanner and the scratch of Claire’s pen on her notepad. Sebastian stood against the wall behind Sutton’s chair, close enough that she could feel his presence without turning around.
The first sketchbook held nothing beyond standard client work. Beautiful work—Penn had been gifted, no matter what else he’d been—but nothing that connected to Ginger’s claims or Claire’s Inkwell file.
The second sketchbook was different. Sutton saw it on the fourth page. The lines were familiar—the same design Ginger had shown her on the phone in the parlor, the tattoo she’d recognized instantly as Penn’s linework.
But these designs weren’t the finished version. They were earlier drafts. Iteration after iteration of Penn refining the overall design and adding layers.
“This is it.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “This is similar to the tattoo Ginger showed me.”
Claire leaned over. Sebastian moved closer.
“Walk us through it,” Claire said.
Sutton traced the design with her fingertip, following the lines the way Penn had taught her to read composition.
“The outer structure looks abstract, decorative. That’s deliberate.
Penn used to talk about hiding meaning in plain sight—building symbols into designs so the viewer saw beauty first and the symbolism second. ”
She pointed to a cluster of geometric shapes nested in the lower curve of the first one. “See how this triangle is inverted here but upright in the next iteration? And the number of lines crossing the central axis changes from version to version.”
She flipped forward three pages. The iterations continued, each one tighter, more refined.
“He was testing different configurations. Figuring out how much information he could embed without breaking the aesthetic. The version Ginger photographed looked like a single design, but I think it’s actually a matrix.
” She flipped back and forth, noting each tiny detail, every variation.
“Each tattoo is customized. The base structure stays the same, but the internal symbols change, probably depending on who it was for.”
“He built a cipher inside a tattoo,” Sebastian said from beside her.
Sutton nodded, a bit of wonder in her voice. “Looks like it, but exactly does it link to?”
Claire made a note. Jasper had stopped scanning, eyes fixed on the sketchbook.
“If the internal symbols are role-specific,” Claire said, “then a detailed analysis of each tattoo could identify the wearer’s position within the organization.”
Sutton huffed. “So if you can decode this key, you can figure out their roles?”
“Possibly.” Claire scribbled notes faster now. “Their role and/or their rank in the organization.”
For the first time in six years, being Penn Crenshaw’s sister was an asset.
Not a brand, not a scarlet letter, not the asterisk that followed her into every room.
She was the only person alive who could read her brother’s shorthand, decode his visual language, translate the meaning buried inside his art.
The knowledge lived in her, trained into her through years of sitting beside Penn, studying his technique, arguing about composition over coffee at two in the morning.
Sutton tapped the sketchbook. “This is the Rosetta Stone.”
They kept going. Sutton turned pages. Jasper scanned.
Claire cataloged. The second sketchbook yielded more—not just designs but margin notes in Penn’s jagged handwriting.
Dates that corresponded to nothing obvious, and initials that might be names or shorthand for something else entirely.
There was a symbol repeated in the corners of several pages: a small circle with a vertical line through it, like a compass needle.
“Do you know what this means?” Claire pointed to the symbol.
Sutton studied it. “It’s not one of his standard marks. He used circles for revision notes and X’s for rejected elements. This is different, though. It could be a reference—a tag for pages that connect to something specific.”
Claire marked it in her file. “What about the initials?”
Sutton read them off, one by one. They meant nothing to her, but Claire’s pen hesitated on two of them, and Garrett straightened almost imperceptibly.
Sutton caught the reaction. “You recognize those?”
“We’ll need to verify,” Claire said carefully. “But if these initials correspond to the individuals I think they do, this is significantly bigger than one assassination attempt and one murdered witness.”
The third sketchbook was the oldest. Penn’s earlier work, less refined, more experimental.
Sutton turned the pages faster here—these were student-era designs, the kind of raw exploration every artist went through before finding their voice.
Dragons. Skulls. A series of botanical studies that were surprisingly delicate for a man who’d built his reputation on bold, graphic work.
Eventually, she began seeing the first formations of the tattoo, scribbled here and there. Words, calculations, and crossed-out notes filled the pages. Then she turned a page and stopped breathing.
It was her. A portrait, rendered in graphite with a precision Penn rarely bothered with—he was a linework artist, bold strokes, high contrast, not the kind of careful tonal rendering that a portrait demanded.
But he’d done it here. Her face looked up from the page in three-quarter profile, chin slightly lifted, a half-smile. Her hair was longer—the way she’d worn it at Corcoran, before she’d started cutting it herself to save money.
The eyes were the part that made her breath come out a little ragged, though. He’d gotten the expression right. The openness. The look she’d had before the world had taught her to guard it.
The portrait was tucked between two pages of tattoo designs. The earliest renderings of the organization’s mark on one side. Her face on the other.
He’d been thinking about her while he was in the middle of whatever this was. While he was building tattoos for a secret organization, he’d stopped to draw Sutton the way he remembered her—young, unguarded, still whole.
The room fell silent. Everyone’s attention on her felt as if something private had been exposed under surgical lights. Her chest went tight. She stood so fast the chair scraped against the floor. “Excuse me.” The words were barely audible.
She was already moving—past Sebastian, past Jasper, past Claire, into the corridor. The hallway stretched in both directions, institutional and featureless, and she picked a direction and walked until she found an exit leading outside.
The cold hit her like a hand on the chest. She leaned against the exterior wall, tipped her head back against the concrete block, and felt the sting of tears. The sky above was enormous and blue, and her heart was too damn raw.
Penn had been branded the reckless brother, the failed artist, the man who’d done something monstrous. The portrait didn’t fit that shape. It fit the one of the brother she’d loved.
The door opened behind her. She didn’t turn.
Sebastian came to stand beside her, his gaze scanning the area. She was an idiot to run outside, even being here at this compound. He had every right to be angry, to order her back inside where it was safe.
But he didn’t. He leaned one shoulder against the wall and waited, the way he’d waited outside her bedroom door the previous night.
The silence stretched. The hawk was back, circling over the tree line.
“He used to quiz me,” Sutton said. Her voice sounded far away.
“On anatomy for figure drawing. He’d hold up his hand and say, ‘How many bones?’ and I’d have to answer before he’d give me back my coffee.
Twenty-seven. The answer is twenty-seven, and I can still hear him saying ‘wrong, it’s thirty-two if you count the sesamoids,’ which who does that?
But he did and he’d argue about it for an hour if you let him. ”
Sebastian nodded, that ghost of a smile lifting the corners of his lips.
“He was the one who told me I should apply to Corcoran. I didn’t think I was good enough.
He sat me down in his apartment with a stack of my sketchbooks and went through them page by page and pointed to every piece that was better than what he’d been doing at my age.
He said, ‘You have a better eye than me, Sut. You just don’t trust it yet. ’”
She swallowed. The cold air burned in her throat.
“He was stubborn. God, he was stubborn. Once he decided something, you couldn’t move him with dynamite.
Our parents tried. Our mother would beg him to consider law school, something stable, and he’d just smile and tell her that stable was where creativity went to die.
He drove them crazy. He drove me crazy. We’d argue about color theory until one of us threw something at the other. ”
Sebastian chuckled.