Chapter 4: Blood & Ultimatums
The sterile scent of antiseptic wipes cut through the usual aroma of ink and leather. Nova focused on the task, her artist’s hands surprisingly steady as she dabbed at the split skin on Garrett’s knuckles with a cotton swab soaked in iodine. The color was violent against his tanned skin.
“Hold still,” she murmured, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“It’s nothing,” Garrett said, but he didn’t pull his hand away. He watched her, the hard line of his jaw softening just a fraction. The break room felt like a charged galaxy of its own, the memory of the supply shelves rattling against the quiet, clinical moment.
“It’s not nothing. You punched a wall. That’s the definition of not nothing.” She blew gently on the wound to dry the iodine, her breath cool on his skin. A shiver, almost imperceptible, traveled up his arm. “What was the wall’s crime, anyway? Bad drywall texture?”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Something like that.”
She picked up a sterile strip, her fingers deft as she began to pull the edges of the broken skin together. The intimacy of it was profound, her touch more clinical than the one they’d shared earlier, yet somehow more exposing. This was damage. She was fixing it.
The door to the private studio swung open without a knock. Will, the shop’s owner and Nova’s oldest friend, filled the doorway. His eyes, sharp behind thick-rimmed glasses, took in the scene: Nova bent over Garrett’s hand, Garrett shirtless on the edge of the tattoo chair, his posture rigid. The air in the room changed, growing denser.
“Client?” Will asked, his voice neutral. He was a big man, former military, with a sleeve of traditional nautical stars and mermaids that contrasted with his quiet demeanor.
“First aid,” Nova said, not looking up. She secured the last strip. “Garrett had a disagreement with the architecture.”
Will stepped inside, letting the door swing shut. He leaned against the counter, crossing his arms. The hum of the overhead lights seemed to grow louder. “Leo said the drywall’s dented near the fuse box. That’s load-bearing framing, not just drywall.”
Garrett’s gaze flicked up, meeting Will’s. A silent communication passed between them, a history Nova wasn’t fully part of. Will had given Garrett this job, this lifeline, when no one else would. The debt was unspoken but always present.
“I’ll fix it,” Garrett said, his voice low.
“You will,” Will agreed. He paused, choosing his words with the care of a man defusing a bomb. “Nova, can you give us a minute?”
Nova finally looked up, her protective instincts flaring. “Why?”
“It’s okay,” Garrett said quietly. He flexed his newly bandaged hand, testing the give of the strips. “It’s fine, Nova.”
It was the dismissal in his tone, the retreat back behind his walls, that stung. She set the tweezers down with a sharp clink on the metal tray, wiped her hands on a paper towel, and stood. She gave Will a look that promised a later conversation, full of pointed questions, then brushed past him out of the room.
She didn’t go far. The main parlour was empty, the last client gone for the day. She pretended to straighten portfolios, her ears straining.
Through the door, the voices were muffled, but the intensity carried.
“...not a recreation of your cell block, Garrett.” Will’s voice, low but clear. “You break the shop, I can deal with that. You break her, and we have a different kind of problem.”
“I’m not going to break her.” Garrett’s reply was taut, defensive.
“You already are. You’re jerking her around with this hot-and-cold routine. She’s in the back playing nurse to your busted knuckles after what, exactly? You think I don’t know that look? The air in here is still smoking.”
Silence.
Then Will again, softer but no less firm. “I know you’re trying. I see it. But she’s not some casual fling you met at a bar. She’s Nova. She cares. And that means you don’t get to half-ass this. You’re either in or you’re out. You tell her the whole truth—the real weight of what you’re carrying, not just the parole officer and the job hunt—or you walk away from her for good. You don’t get to kiss her in the break room and then pretend she’s just another artist in the shop. That’s the coward’s move.”
Another, longer silence. Nova held her breath, her hand frozen on a sketchbook.
“What if the truth is what makes her walk away?” Garrett’s voice was barely audible, stripped raw.
“Then that’s her choice. But you don’t get to make it for her. That’s not protection. That’s arrogance.”
The stool in the studio scraped against the floor. Nova hurriedly moved away from the door, her heart hammering against her ribs. The whole truth. What hadn’t he told her?
A moment later, Will emerged alone. He saw her, nodded once—a grim, understanding look—and walked to the front desk, leaving her in the dim quiet of the parlour.
Garrett didn’t come out.
Nova stood amidst the artwork and the silent machines, the words hanging in the air like settling dust. The whole truth. The kiss had been a collision, a moment of pure, desperate feeling. But this—this was the aftermath. The messy, complicated terrain where real people navigated real damage. She’d seen the good in him, always. Now, Will’s ultimatum forced the question: was she brave enough, or foolish enough, to let him show her the bad?
The door to the studio remained closed. A definitive line. On one side, the known world of ink and art and easy camaraderie. On the other, Garrett Rhodes and everything he hadn’t said.
She took a deep breath, the scent of the shop—her sanctuary—filling her lungs. Then she walked to the closed door and knocked, two firm raps that echoed in the empty shop.
“Garrett? We need to talk. And this time, you’re actually going to.”
He didn’t answer, but the lock clicked open. Nova pushed the door in. He was sitting on the edge of the tattoo chair, his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor between his boots. The single overhead light carved deep shadows under his eyes and along the set line of his shoulders. The bandage on his hand was a stark white flag against his skin.
She closed the door behind her, sealing them in the quiet. The only sound was the faint, perpetual hum of the fridge in the break room beyond the wall. She leaned back against the door, not trusting her legs to carry her closer. “Will’s right. You’re jerking me around.”
“I know.” The words were gravel.
“So stop.” She crossed her arms, a barrier over her own heartbeat. “What’s the whole truth, Garrett? What’s so bad that you think you get to decide I can’t handle it?”
He laughed then, a hollow, joyless sound that scraped the room. “It’s not about what you can handle. It’s about what comes with me. It’s not a past, Nova. It’s a current. A living thing.” He finally looked up, and his blue eyes were shattered glass. “You remember my brother, Trevor.”
It wasn’t a question. She nodded slowly. A skinny kid with Garrett’s smile, always hovering in the background before everything went wrong.
“He got in deep. Bad people. A gambling debt that wasn’t just money.” Garrett’s gaze fixed on a point on the wall, seeing something else. “They were going to take his hands. Literally. He came to me, sobbing, a complete mess. I had nothing. No money, no leverage.”
He took a sharp breath, as if the air had grown thin. “I knew a guy who knew a guy. They needed a driver for a job. A simple in-and-out. A warehouse. No weapons, they said. Just drive the van, keep the engine running, get a cut to clear Trevor’s debt.”
Nova’s blood went cold. She uncrossed her arms, her fingers going numb.
“I was the driver.” He stated it flatly, a clinical fact. “It wasn’t a warehouse. It was a check-cashing place. And the guy who said no weapons was lying. One of them had a gun. It went off.” His jaw worked. “No one was hit. But it changed everything. The charge, the time… everything.”
“You took the fall,” Nova whispered, the pieces snapping into a terrible picture.
“I was the driver. It was my fault. I got the longest sentence because I wouldn’t give the others up. Trevor’s debt was to them, Nova. The ones with the gun. If I talked, they would have finished what they started with him.” He looked at his hands, at the fresh bandage. “I did the five years. I kept my mouth shut. Trevor visited once, first year. Never came back. He moved out west. He doesn’t call.”
The sheer, lonely weight of it pressed down on the room. Nova felt her throat tighten.
“That’s not the whole truth,” he said, his voice dropping so low she had to strain to hear. “The whole truth is the guy I wouldn’t give up? He’s out. He’s been out. And he owns a piece of my parole. Not officially. But he’s the ‘legitimate business associate’ my PO casually mentions I should be grateful to for my job at the scrapyard. The one who drops by to remind me that quiet mouths stay healthy. That’s the stain. It doesn’t wash off. It’s not just me, Nova. It’s a web. And if you’re close to me, you’re in it.”
He stood up suddenly, the chair rolling back with a sharp screech. “The guy I punched the wall over today? He was here. Delivering a ‘friendly reminder’ about my payments. That’s my life. A fucking protection racket wrapped in parole conditions. That’s what I wanted to keep from you. Not some noble secret. It’s ugly. It’s dangerous. And it’s forever.”
He was breathing hard, as if he’d just run miles. The confession hung between them, a monstrous, shared thing. The hum of the fridge seemed to swell, filling the silence he’d left.
Nova pushed off from the door. She took two steps into the center of the room, into the light, stopping an arm’s length from him. She didn’t touch him. She just looked at him, at the raw agony on his face, at the truth he’d finally laid bare.
“Okay,” she said, the word simple and solid in the charged air.
His eyes flashed with confusion, with fear. “Okay? That’s it? ‘Okay’?”
“It’s not ‘okay’. None of it is okay.” Her voice was steady, a stark contrast to his. “But it’s the truth. And now it’s mine, too.”
He stared at her, his chest rising and falling like he’d been fighting. “You don’t get it. This isn’t a shared secret between us. It’s a leash.” He ran his bandaged hand over his mouth, the gesture weary. “The guy today, Marcus, he saw you through the window. Noted your pink hair. Said you looked ‘interesting’.”
The air turned to ice. Nova felt the words like a physical touch, cold and invasive. “He threatened me?”
“He doesn’t make threats. He makes observations. The threat is in the observation.” Garrett’s voice was hollow. “You being near me puts a target on your back. Not a maybe. A certainty.”
She absorbed this, the reality of it settling deeper than the story of the robbery, deeper than his brother’s betrayal. This was present tense. This was the man in the scrapyard office, the unseen pressure on his parole, now given a name and a face that had looked at her. The vibrant, controlled world of her studio felt suddenly porous, vulnerable.
“So what’s the solution?” she asked, her own voice surprisingly calm. “You disappear? I change my hair and hide?”
“The solution is I handle it. Alone.” He took a step toward her, then stopped himself, fists clenched at his sides. “The solution is you walk out that door and you live your life. You ink your clients. You laugh with Will. You find some clean, simple guy who doesn’t have blood and favours hanging over him.”
“Clean and simple,” she repeated, the words tasting like ash. She looked at the tattoo on his forearm, the wolf she’d traced with her fingers. A symbol of loyalty, of the pack. The irony was a sharp ache. “You think that’s what I want?”
“It’s what you should want.” His certainty was a wall.
She let the silence stretch, the hum of the neon sign outside the window bleeding into the room. She thought of the kiss, all desperate heat and no future. She thought of his hand under hers, bleeding, and the careful way she’d stitched him back together. You can’t fix this, a voice inside her whispered. This isn’t a wound. It’s a ecosystem.
“You’re asking me to choose,” she said finally.
“I’m telling you the choice is already made.” His eyes held hers, no longer shattered, but resolved into something hard and final. “I can’t be the reason something happens to you. I won’t.”
“And what about what happens to you?” she shot back, a flare of anger cutting through the cold dread. “You just go back into that… that web alone? You think that’s better?”
“It’s what I know.” He gave a single, sharp shrug. “It’s what I deserve.”
There it was. The core of it. Not just protection, but penance. He was offering her a way out because he believed he didn’t deserve a way in. Her walking away would confirm every rotten thing he thought about himself. The weight of that realization was heavier than any fear of a man named Marcus.
She looked at him—really looked—at the man standing in the pool of electric light, offering her his ruin as the only gift he could give. Her heart cracked, not with romance, but with a profound, grieving understanding.
He was right.
Staying now, charging forward on nothing but feeling, would be a beautiful, stupid tragedy. It would make her a weapon against him. It would tangle them both in a knot there was no cutting. The truth wasn’t just his to carry; it was hers to acknowledge. And acknowledging it meant seeing the exit.
A numbness spread through her, steadying her. She nodded, once. Not in agreement, but in acceptance.
“Okay, Garrett.”
She turned and walked to the studio door, her boots quiet on the polished concrete. Her hand paused on the cool metal knob. She didn’t look back. “When you decide you deserve more than what you know,” she said, the words clear and level, “you know where I am.”
Then she opened the door.
She walked away.
The faint scent of ink and antiseptic followed her into the empty parlour, then faded with each step across the worn floorboards. The front door chimed its soft, familiar bell as she pushed out into the encroaching twilight.