Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

She’d agreed.

Mostly, I thought, because a group of college girls had trailed in behind me and stayed the whole time I worked in the back just so one’a them could snag my number.

So I got a job that would go a long way to help payin’ the bills for a family of six gone to eight soon as we got Dane and Lila back. Like hell I’d tell my parents I quit school to help out, though, and I wouldn’t have to as long as mum kept lettin’ me do the books. She hated numbers somethin’ fierce and had put me in charge at thirteen when I kinda showed a penchant for math.

When I finished my shift four hours later, my hands were singed from the steaming water and hard, industrial soap, my skin burnin’ like a low-grade buzz of electricity. I hissed as I exited at the back of the diner the handle pokin’ the new blister on my palm as I pushed into the cool night air. Stella’d hire me so I shoulda felt some sense of satisfaction. Instead, I flipped open my phone and stared at the photo of the dirty alleyway Dane had captured in Vancouver outside his foster home, then the cluster of indigo berries Lila had sent from her blueberry farm in the Okanagan.

It’d been a few days since I’d sent them anythin’ myself, and I knew they lived for the glimpses of home. So even though I was tired as fuck and my hands ached, I hefted my backpack over my shoulder and headed out of downtown Entrance to find somethin’ to tag with graffiti.

I was thinkin’ they’d like a mock-up of The Three Caballeros because it was one’a the only movies they’d had growin’ up, and Lila liked to call us that sometimes, like we were some kinda boxset.

Who woulda thought, two seventeen-year-old guys and a six-year-old girl they both woulda died for.

It was weird as fuck, somethin’ I never mentioned at school to the friends there who didn’t matter because they’d never get what family meant to me or mine.

But they were mine.

My life, my choice, my family.

I didn’t give a fuck that I’d known them for less than a year or that they were hours away from me now.

I could still show them that someone cared about them when it seemed like they didn’t have fuck-all left.

So I trekked the twenty minutes out of town to get to the industrial neighborhood north on the Sea to Sky Highway where I could graffiti without threat of Entrance PD cruisin’ by. There was a bar I’d been meanin’ to hit up, a long, low, one story buildin’ painted turquoise with a bright pink neon sign that read Eugene’s. There were rows of Harley’s outside and a lot filled with dirt-filmed trucks. A rough man’s hangout.

I doubted they’d mind more graffiti bein’ added to the edifice, and I was hot shit with a spray can.

Dumpin’ my bag on the ground, I stepped back with an aerosol can of black and studied the empty left corner of the wall on the far side of the back entrance before gettin’ to work. I wore a bandana over my mouth to keep my throat from gettin’ too raw from the chemical spray and my hood pulled up to obscure my face from any nosy fuckers passin’ by. When I finished, night had settled a dark cloak over the lot, and my design was lit only by the harsh yellow glare of the artificial lights installed at the base of the roof.

My arms ached from holdin’ them up, and my eyes burned with exhaustion, but I finally felt good, at peace for the first time in a long time.

I dug my phone out from the back pocket of my jeans and snapped a photo of The Three Caballeros.

“’S not bad,” a gruff voice said from my left, startlin’ me so bad I dropped my phone to the asphalt, wincin’ as I watched it crack.

Anger on my tongue, I whipped around to deliver a scathin’ fuckin’ beat down to whoever the hell thought it was a good idea to sneak up on a guy with spray paint in one hand and his phone in the other.

“You wanna face full’a chemicals, ass––” I choked off the curse when I caught sight of the man who’d spoken.

Because he was huge.

As in, fuckin’ mammoth.

Tatted, bearded, clad in a leather cut with badges sewn onto the left breast, the top one of which read ‘VP’.

I recognized him because I’d seen the fleet of bikes roll through town on a rumble of manmade thunder and had taken note. And I’d taken note because somethin’ in their way, the independence, the flagrant refusal to fit in and toe the line, stirred my blood and called to me like a howl from fellow wolves.