Page 130 of Deacon

Ink kept walking like the greeting wasn’t worth slowing down for. I stopped. “Legends, huh?”

Garrett’s mouth tipped at one corner. “Seemed respectful.”

“Sure it did.” Tattoo shops were full of personalities, and shy didn’t keep a chair booked. Still, there was something about how quickly he’d found his footing that kept me paying attention.

Ink stopped near the bay, expression flat. “You get settled?”

“Mostly.” Garrett looked around again. “Nice setup.”

Ink gave him one short nod. “You’ll learn it.”

Garrett’s gaze drifted toward the front counter. “She always look like she’s one bad sentence away from stabbing a man in the throat?”

Rory never looked up from the tray. “Only if he deserves it.”

Garrett grinned. “Good to know.”

Ronan’s mouth shifted at one corner while I jerked my chin toward the bays and started the walk-through. “Alright. Bookings run through the front, but everybody handles their own consults and repeat clients. Everybody’s got a lane they’re best in,” I said. “Rory leans watercolor and runs the piercings. Ronan does a lot of new school. Vise is strongest in neo-traditional. Ink loves geometric but also does blackwork. Priest is strictly blackwork. I’m American traditional. Doesn’t mean that’s all we do. Client books with you for somethin’ outside your usual, you handle it if it’s in your wheelhouse. But those are the styles people mostly know us for.”

Garrett’s attention moved over the flash and framed work. “Your specialty’s realism?” I asked.

“Photorealism mostly,” he said. “Portraits. Animal work. Memorial pieces. Anything where people want skin to look like it’s holdin’ a photograph instead of ink.”

His portfolio backed it up. The man could do faces well enough to make you forget you were looking at skin.

Vise leaned against the wall and took a drink. “Which means when somebody comes in wantin’ their dead grandmother lookin’ exactly like the picture from 1987, he’s your problem now.”

Garrett laughed. “That happen often?”

“Often enough,” Rory muttered from the front.

“That,” I added, “and every man in a fifty-mile radius wants a lion, a clock, or his kid’s face lookin’ heroic.”

Garrett gave me a knowing look. “And they all say they want somethin’ original.”

Ronan answered from behind us. “All of ’em,” he said.

Garrett laughed again, easier this time, and the shop absorbed him into its rhythm faster than I expected. He fit into the banter fast. That should have made hiring him feel settled. Instead, the faint scrape between my shoulders stayed.

We took him upstairs to the rooms over the shop. He’d already dropped his bag in the one we gave him, but sleeping over a Saints business came with expectations beyond paying rent.

I leaned against the doorframe while Garrett looked around. “Better than some apartments I’ve had,” he said.

Ink barely glanced inside. “That says more about your apartments than the room,” he said.

Garrett turned to him. “You always this friendly?”

Ink’s face didn’t move. “Only with strangers.”

“Good,” Garrett said, grin returning. “I’d hate to peak too early.”

Rory had followed far enough to hear that and made a sound from the hall that could have been disgust or amusement.

I folded my arms. “Bookings start light your first week. We’ll feed you enough to settle in and let people start askin’ for you. You pull your weight, respect the shop, and don’t create bullshit where there doesn’t need to be any, you’ll be fine.”

I gave him a steady look. “Good,” I said. “That’s what matters.”

Garrett looked between Ink and me. “And before either of you start worryin’, I’m an equal-opportunity flirt. Men, women, doesn’t matter much to me. But I know how to work without makin’ the place weird.”