Page 264 of Slashed Bonds

I’d asked, in the car, where they’d put it. Cassian had said you’ll see and Nikolai had said same place as you, Mommy, obviously and Killian had said nothing and turned his left hand over on the steering wheel and looked at the back of it like he was measuring.

Knox has come over. He does that when a room’s attention goes to one spot, he goes to the spot, and he’s put his chin on my knee with the X over his eye toward the lamp, and he’s looking at my purple hand the way he looked at the first bowl Killian ever put down for him. Like it might be a trick. Like it might be real.

“He’s not getting one,” I tell Valerie.

“He’s got one.” She tips her head at the X. “Somebody did his first. I’m doing yours.”

Somebody did his. On purpose, with a blade, because he was mine and loud. And here he is, with his chin on my knee, un-shredded, in a basement full of people who’d die for him.

Valerie sits.

Pulls the stool in close so her knee’s against the chair. Takes the machine off the tray and holds it the way Nikolai holds a glove, like it’s a part of her hand that happens to detach, and dips the needle into the dark reservoir to secure it, and the lamp catches the oil-sheen on the tip.

Somewhere above us, the laundromat bell rings. Feet on the stairs. Two sets, identical, and the crinkle of a paper bag that’s got far too many jars in it.

Pickles. God. Nine days of new chemistry and I’m about to cry over pickles in a tattoo chair.

Valerie looks at me over the machine.

“Ready?”

I look at my hand. At the purple butterfly on it and the two small ones on my finger and the ink underneath that a scared man put there to hide something, and the woman about to put something over it that won’t hide anything at all.

“For this permanent vicious commitment?” I grin. “Fuck yeah.”

CHAPTER 41

A Sense Of Community

~MORRIGAN~

“PLAYING BADMINTON AFTER GETTING TATTOOS IS FUCKING DIABOLICAL!”

Maddie’s standing on the curb with her hands on her hips, scolding us at a volume the whole parking lot can hear, pink from the scrunchie down.

“You might as well do a SPIN CLASS!”

I’m laughing too hard to answer her.

We all are. Four of us in the middle of a grocery-store parking lot on a Saturday afternoon with a net strung between two shopping carts and a birdie going back and forth over it, half drunk on something that isn’t alcohol, laughing our heads off at nothing. At the birdie. At the sky. At the fact that a woman with a cling-wrapped hand is diving for a shuttlecock between two parked minivans.

Whatever’s in this ink needs to be investigated as the new crack. I mean that. Somebody call somebody.

The energy’s unreal.

It came on about three hours after Valerie lifted the needle, a warmth under the skin of my hand first, spreading up my forearm like something waking up, and then a thing in my chest I don’t have a word for except more. More air in the lungs. More spring in the knee. I feel like I could beat someone up on the ice, then beat someone up off it, then run a marathon, then come back and ask what’s for dinner.

Val said nausea. Val said maybe vomiting while the pigment argued with my hormones. Val didn’t say I’d want to climb a building.

Or maybe she did and I wasn’t listening because a man had said wedding rings.

The hand itself is a thing I keep looking at. Under the cling wrap it’s red, raised, and the umber’s gone dark the way fresh ink goes, and the monarch across the back of it moves when I grip the racket, the aura stretching between the tendons like smoke pulled in a draft. The two small ones on my finger are too swollen yet to read. Val said a week before they settle. Val said don’t pick.

I’m not picking. I’m looking. There’s a difference, and the difference is that one of them I can stop.

So we’re out here in what’s unarguably sweater weather, in shorts and fitted tops, with our breath showing between points, playing badminton in a parking lot like a pack of hooligans.

Coach gave us the weekend.