Mad Dog (Second Skin Book 1) Page 5

“Don’t give me lip, son.”

  “What? I didn’t . . .” Sam tries to backtrack, but it’s too late. The telltale twitch appears in Dad’s left cheek, and he lunges at my brother before I can react.

  “Smart-assed pussy. You can’t fucking fool me.”

  Sam flinches and moves to evade Dad, but the old man grabs his collar and hauls him out of the chair.

  “Put him the fuck down!” My bellow bounces off the walls, louder than I intended, and I regret the horrified look Mom gives me. Dad just sneers at me before turning his attention back to Sam, who dangles from his grip, nose-to-nose with the old bastard. Sam’s a big kid—he definitely passes for twenty-one—but that doesn’t change the fact that Dad outweighs him by about fifty pounds, all of it sinewy muscle.

  “Julian, honey. Please stop. You promised you’d stop.” Mom’s voice sounds calm but as brittle as the eggshells we constantly walk on around Dad.

  “I’ll teach you not to talk back, you little shit.” He slams Sam back against the wall, and I’m already in motion when he raises his hand to strike.

  Mom is faster, her palm hitting my chest and her other grabbing Dad’s wrist.

  “No! I said stop!”

  “Goddammit, Marcella. Get out of my way!” Dad lets go of Sam and turns, grabbing Mom by the shoulders and bending down to shove his face into hers with a harsh sneer.

  “You’re the one who spoils these goddamn kids. It’s on you if they turn out like shit. I’m the only one who gives a fuck about discipline in this house.” His fingertips dig hard into her as he shakes her, then shoves her away from him. Mom gasps and falls backward into the kitchen counter, catching herself and upending a bowl of chips, which clatters to the floor.

  “Get the fuck out of my sight,” Dad says, looking back at Sam with disgust as he disappears back outside.

  “My fucking pleasure,” Sam says. He shoots me a pleading look. “Can we get outta here?”

  I’m on the verge of storming after Dad and giving him a taste of his own medicine, but Mom’s pleading look stalls me. Escalating things isn’t the answer, so I rein in the impulse. I glance at Sam, then down at Mom and Elle, who are cleaning up the mess. “We should all get the fuck out of here. I’d take all of you, but I brought my bike today.”

  “Take Sam and go,” Elle says. “We’ll be fine.”

  Sam’s already disappeared into his room, and I crouch down to gather up a handful of stray chips and toss them into the trash. “You two should get in the car and leave that fucker. Come stay with me until he’s gone, both of you.”

  Mom’s jaw is clenched so tight I’m surprised she answers. “If I leave, it’ll just make him angrier. I can handle him. Elle can spend the afternoon at Rosie’s.”

  “I’m not leaving you, Mom,” Elle protests.

  “Yeah, me neither.” I cross my arms and clench my jaw.

  “Yes, you are. He’ll calm down if it’s just the two of us.” She squeezes Elle’s shoulder, then stands and wipes her hands off on a towel. “I’ll wrap up some food for you and the boys to take with you.”

  She gives me a stern look, reminding me that despite Dad’s insistence that she’s soft on us, she has always known how to calm him down. After a brief staredown, I finally relent and retreat to the front porch and park my ass on the top step while I wait, though it takes some work to tamp down the familiar sick feeling of impotence roiling in my gut. A moment later, Sam storms out, backpack slung over one shoulder as he madly stuffs his sketchbook in the open zipper pocket.

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me drink tonight,” he says.

  “Not a fucking chance. Half his issues are booze related. It’s best you don’t start seeing the stuff as an answer to your problems, because it isn’t. You want to tell me what the fuck happened to you this afternoon? That shiner wasn’t his fault—Dad didn’t have time to hit you that hard.” I point at the dried blood that still coats his eyebrow.

  Sam snorts and shakes his head. “Not that he hasn’t tried.” He opens his mouth to explain, then stalls as the door opens behind me. He side-eyes Elle with a tilt of his head. Did whatever he was about to say have something to do with her?

  She pushes out of the house, lugging a book bag that looks like it weighs a metric ton along with a stack of Tupperware containers. She drops the bag with a thunk beside me and bends down to hand me the food, then plants a kiss on my cheek.

  “I’ll check on her later,” she whispers, then hoists the bag up and slings it over her shoulder. She pats Sam on the back before trotting down the front walk. Pausing at the curb to check for traffic, she jogs the rest of the way across the street and down the block to the apartment building where her best friend, Rosie Vega, lives.

  Sam’s gaze follows her, and it isn’t until she disappears inside the building that he turns back to me. “I didn’t want her to hear, but those fucking Quin twins were talking shit about Elle.”

  “The Quiñones brothers? That doesn’t sound like them.” I vividly recall the pair in my shop Saturday night, pulling Leo off Gustavo like they were all business.

  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 h
im 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 him beaten up to protect my virtue when we were teens. His heavy-handed attitude toward my love life hasn’t changed since. The tattoo was one way for me to assert my bodily autonomy at the time, since sex was out of the question.

  “On my eighteenth birthday. My gift to myself. A reminder to live despite whatever adversity tries to weigh me down.”

  He nods toward my other arm. “And by balance, you mean something similar, I take it? Why not go back to her? This organic style and color is more her thing. I do blackwork mostly.”

  “Do I need a reason to want you to give me a tattoo?”

  He lifts an eyebrow, evidence that despite having only a few precious conversations of substance when we were younger, he still knows me well. “Sweetness, you always have a reason to do what you do.”

  I grit my teeth, not wanting to admit the truth, which is hard enough to admit to myself as it is. I missed him. The time apart hurt for years, and just when I finally get to the point of forgetting more often than I remember, he shows back up. I have no idea if he’ll stick around, and even if he does, there’s no way we can be together. Papá’s as possessive of me as ever, despite giving me freedom in my role as our organization’s CFO. So I want something to keep with me, to remind me of what Maddox and I once shared.

  “I like the idea of the contrast,” I say, pulling something plausible out of my ass. “Toni’s delicate, organic style juxtaposed with your harder-edged, darker aesthetic.” He’s giving me a dubious look, and I can’t keep a straight face. I smirk and try to hold in a laugh. “What? I love art.”

  He just shakes his head and chuckles. “Keep telling yourself that. You’ve inflated my ego by a factor of ten thousand just by asking for my tattoo to ride alongside hers. How many others do you have?”

  “Just the one.”

  He nods, and a cocky grin spreads across his face. “Can I sign it the way she did?”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  He pulls out a sketchbook and settles on a stool to begin sketching. I feel conspicuous just standing there watching, so I wander around the room to let him work. In a former life, this space was the reception area for his mother’s dance studio, which sits empty on the other side of the wall of windows. My dance classes were always Friday evenings, though I know Marcella Santos had a busier schedule than that. It’s only noon, so the place will stay empty until around three p.m., when school lets out. Then it’ll fill with girls in pink leotards who dream of becoming ballerinas.

  I wasn’t one of those girls. Maybe at first I was, but the day my mother died, all those frilly dreams disappeared along with her. I still danced for six more years after that because it was something she’d wanted for me, and because it was the only way I could see Maddox without raising my father’s suspicions.

  “How is your mother?” I ask, picturing the pretty, dark-haired woman with the tall, willowy frame. Marcella Santos was born to dance, unlike me, even managing to look graceful while she was pregnant. By the time I quit at fifteen, I was spilling out of my leotards and envied the slimmer girls who had true dancer physiques.

  A shadow crosses his expression but is gone as quickly as it appears.

  “Still teaching five days a week. If you want to hang for a few hours, I’m sure she’d love to see you. I have other clients this afternoon, though, so you’d be on your own.”

  “Maybe another day. Papá’s expecting me for a meeting in an hour.” My gaze snags on the old wood floor, still polished to a shine, and the mirrors lining the studio’s walls, and a sense of longing tugs at my insides. Then I head back to see his progress.

  He flips the sketch around when I reach him, and I’m unable to suppress an excited smile at the piece of art he’s rendered in only a few minutes. “It’s just a rough sketch. I’ll scan it tonight and work it up in detail digitally.”

  The design is a rose in full bloom, and where the tiny seedling looked like it struggled to break through hard stone, the rose has encompassed the stone in its roots, leaving cracks. It’s all rendered in black ink with precise hatching for shadows and a background layer of abstract lines that resemble the skyline of a city.

  “It’s perfect,” I breathe.

  “Forgot something,” he says, turning the design around. He presses the pen to the paper along the dark edge of the cracked stone and scrawls Mad Dog in dark, geometric lettering, a stark contrast to the flowing script Toni uses. Then he grins at me.

  I smile. “Even better. Do I need to give you a deposit or something?”

  He waves me off. “I trust you. When do you want to come back?”

  I’m not even ready to leave, so the question takes me a second to process. I finally make an appointment for the end of the week, during the time when my old dance classes used to meet. Hopefully, I can come a little early and say hello to Marcella too.

  Maddox catches me staring at the studio and pulls out a set of keys from under the counter. “You want to visit the studio? I can let us in. You can look around if you want. It really hasn’t changed despite me setting up shop out here. The only new thing is the tattoo chair and the new cabinets in Mom’s old office.

  “I’d love that. Thank you.”

  He unlocks the door that separates the two spaces, explaining that they never open it anymore. It apparently wasn’t cost-effective to do serious renovation to downsize, so as long as he and his mom are comfortable with their arrangement, they plan to keep it as is. There are blinds that can be lowered for privacy, but so far they haven’t had any complaints about Maddox’s line of work.

  “You’ve done a good job keeping it looking sharp and trendy,” I say, gesturing to the photographs
that line the walls of his shop before we pass through the door into the studio. “Do you sell those on consignment for the photographers?” They’re stunning images in a series, all macro shots of tattoos or close-ups of body parts with tattoos, so I doubt they’re mass-produced. If my father saw them, I imagine he’d consider buying them all.

  My breath catches when I walk into the studio and get a closer look at the series of framed dancer images that grace the few feet of wall that aren’t occupied by mirrors.

  “Well, considering I’m the photographer, not exactly. Anything to make a little extra cash. The lease on this place isn’t cheap. It’s one of the reasons I live upstairs. Not exactly five stars, but I pretty much only sleep there.” I turn and stare at him, my look apparently amusing him enough to laugh. “Don’t look so damn shocked. Mom instilled a healthy appreciation for the arts in all of us. Sam’s the one with most of the talent, but I got my fair share. We’re still trying to figure out what the hell happened to Elle though. She’s more about numbers.”

  “Your little sister. I remember her.” I can easily picture the tiny, black-haired girl with big hazel eyes who appeared every so often during my last year of class. She’d mimic the other dancers, then get bored and spend her time at the reception desk, more content mashing buttons on the computer. “How old is she now?”

  “Sixteen. She’s set to graduate early. I think she’s the only thing pushing Sam to actually finish this year. He can’t stand the idea of failing senior year again while his sister blows by him. Fucking smart as a whip. She knows what she wants in life.”

  He exudes pride when he talks about her, and when I reach the bar, I look at him in the mirror and smile. “Sounds like a Santos to me.”

  Music filters in from his shop as I grip the smooth wood. I kick off my low-heeled sandals, enjoying the way the warm wood floor feels against my bare feet. I don’t remember the last time I danced. I tried to keep it up, but finishing high school absorbed my waking hours, followed by a grueling college schedule, then an MBA program that left little room for extracurriculars. I was determined to earn my place in my father’s organization rather than have it handed to me, yet I still feel like I’m stuck on the outside looking in most of the time.