Benny and Baz are Sam’s age, though I doubt they finished high school. The streets are in their blood as thick as they are in Leo’s, and they got started early, while Sam had three older brothers to keep him more or less on the straight and narrow. Despite all that, they’ve struck me as honorable to a fault, the same as Leo.
“They had a fucking picture of her. I saw it. They said she fucking texted it to them. She wouldn’t, would she?”
“You’d have to ask her that. What kind of picture was it?” I hope to fuck it wasn’t something compromising, or I’ll have to go knock some teenage heads this afternoon.
Sam shrugs. “Just a selfie. You can tell she’s holding the camera. I think she took it last night while she was studying—the background looks like your place, anyway.”
“Nothing below the neck?”
He frowns and considers my question, then shakes his head. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
I chuckle. “Did it occur to you that she might have friends? What were they actually saying about her?”
He gets a sulky look and touches his wounded eyebrow, which has acquired a small bandage since I stepped out onto the porch. “Can we just go?”
I drop the subject because I’m fairly certain he won’t own up to the possibility he might have gone down to the corner looking for a fight to start with. Dad has a way of making us want to punch things, and we know better than to start throwing fists at a man that much bigger than us. A pair of young thugs like the Quin brothers are always raring to go and, between the two of them, would give Sam a good fight and let him blow off steam.
“Did you at least get some good hits in?” I ask, earning myself a laugh as Sam carefully slides my spare motorcycle helmet over his wounded head.
“You better fucking believe it.”
6
Celeste
The painted windows of Mad Dog Tattoo gleam in the afternoon sunlight. When I walked by last Saturday night, the connection didn’t register. I’d been too wrapped up in revisiting a building I hadn’t been in for ages, my stomach tangled over the prospect of running into old ghosts. At that moment, Mad Dog was just another edgy name for one of dozens of similar shops in the city.
The ghosts are still there a week later, waiting just inside the shop, only they’re in the form of a living, breathing man who looks nothing like the seventeen-year-old boy who changed my world for the better. Now, he looks like everything the words on the window promise.
The look in Maddox Santos’ steel-gray eyes as I push through the door makes it difficult to tell whether any shred of that sweet boy still remains. I barely recognize him. He’s all bulky, hard, tattooed muscle under a threadbare black Alice In Chains T-shirt. His dark-brown hair is shorn close to his head, and his eyes see straight into my soul. Last weekend, I was stunned speechless when it hit me who I was looking at, and all those stolen moments came rushing back. I had to see him again, but now that he’s right in front of me, I have no idea what to say.
I stop just inside the door, heart pounding, and manage, “Hello, Maddox.”
“Celeste,” he says with a nod, his intense eyes fixed on mine. “You look good.”
His gaze never wavers from mine, like he sees more than just how fit and put together I am. I may be wearing a designer dress and a haircut that could pay his rent, but the compliment encompasses so much more than just my appearance. There’s also a wariness in his gaze I can’t ignore, and I wince as regret cuts into me. I take a step closer, studying his face, finding scars that weren’t there the day we last kissed. How many of those came from the beating my father ordered?
“You look . . . different,” I say, moving to the counter. I have to tilt my head to look up into his eyes. I let my gaze fall to his tattooed left arm and frown at the uneven flesh beneath the ink. More scars, these so severe I doubt they were my father’s doing. I should be relieved, but it only makes me ache more for what I don’t know.
“War changes you.” His fist clenches and drops to his side, as if he wants to hide the damage he knows I’ve seen. “Listen, I blocked out an hour for a consultation. Do you want a tattoo or not?”
“I do.” My heart sinks at his suddenly cool demeanor, but I lift my hand and place it palm up in front of him. “Something to balance this on my other wrist.” The sole tattoo I possess is of a tiny green bud curling up through rocky earth, on the verge of opening and reaching for the sun. At its base, coiling tendrils of roots spread out into intricate scrollwork that wraps halfway around the underside of my wrist. It has a signature, because I made Toni incorporate that into the roots when she gave it to me. It was her very first real tattoo, one that wasn’t inked into synthetic practice skin, so I wanted her to treat it like a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork. I even paid her for it, though she’d have happily given it to me for free.
Maddox’s eyebrows shoot up and he smiles. “No shit. When did you get this?” He cups my hand in his and bends lower, tracing the tiny Valentine with one finger. The ink has faded enough in the past eight years so most people don’t even notice it, but the signature is still visible.
My stomach flips at his gentle touch, and I swallow hard. A man hasn’t touched me this way since the last time Maddox touched me. Papá had
