Shadows You Left

by Jude Sierra

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Content Warnings

  I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  II

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  III

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  IV

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more New Adult titles from Entangled Embrace… Promise Me

  Falling for the Player

  Wild Child

  Chaos and Control

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Jude Sierra and Taylor Brooke. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 105, PMB 159

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  rights@entangledpublishing.com

  Embrace is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Lydia Sharp

  Cover design by Bree Archer

  Cover photography by

  Tony Marturano/GettyImages

  fxquadro/DepositPhotos

  ISBN 978-1-64063-813-6

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition May 2019

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for supporting a small publisher! Entangled prides itself on bringing you the highest quality romance you’ve come to expect, and we couldn’t do it without your continued support. We love romance, and we hope this book leaves you with a smile on your face and joy in your heart.

  xoxo

  Liz Pelletier, Publisher

  For the Fighters and the Artists

  and those of us still figuring out

  how to be both.

  Content Warnings

  Shadows You Left features themes, imagery, and content that may be triggering for some readers. We’ve provided a list of content warnings below:

  Discussions of alcoholism, drug abuse, and death appear throughout the novel. Scenes depicting anxiety, panic attacks, and graphic violence also appear, as well as flashback scenes involving a fatal drug overdose.

  I

  Imugi

  To find a falling star and catch it.

  Chapter One

  There once was a dragon who had a taste for lively things, things of green and gold—lush things, untamable things. But as soon as he had what he wanted, everything turned to soot in his mouth. This dragon had lived in the attic of Erik’s mind for decades, spurred on by stories told at his bedside about fiery breath and leathery wings, brave knights, and caves full of riches.

  But stories were just stories. The dragon from his mother’s old book had been a lullaby for Erik, the child who was afraid of the dark, and not Erik O’Malley, the Friday night draw at last week’s fight.

  He remembered his mother’s voice, her fingertips on his cheek. “You’re my little dragon, you know that?”

  Erik wrapped a piece of medical tape around his palm and over his knuckles, covering a ridge of torn flesh and muddied bruises. Scabs littered his fingers and broken capillaries dusted the top of his hand. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink and tilted his head, examining the maroon mark high on his cheek.

  Dragons are meant for skies, not cages, Erik thought. Unless they’re fighting in them.

  He ran a hand through dark hair and pushed it out of his face. Three tiny pinpricks decorated each ear. They hadn’t seen jewelry in months. Two empty holes lingered beneath his mouth, where hoops used to hug his bottom lip. Knuckles slammed against his chin, jaw, and mouth too often to risk wearing them anymore. It wasn’t worth the potential scar if they got ripped out.

  Something clattered in the busy kitchen on the first floor. He glanced at the tile under his feet, then at the claw-foot bathtub crowded against the wall, next to the sink. Someone shouted in Thai. Kitchenware hit the ground, and a storm of voices cut through the floorboards into Erik’s dingy studio apartment.

  There were pros and cons to living above Thai on the Fly. Discounted basil fried rice, an abundance of green curry, and having the friendliest family in Capitol Hill as downstairs neighbors made the pro list. Sharing a ventilation system with a busy restaurant and having a brick wall on the other side of his window wasn’t all that glamorous. Erik didn’t need glamorous, though. He didn’t even want glamorous. But a view of the city—the street, at least—would’ve made his three hundred square feet feel more like home.

  Not that Erik wanted home, either. He’d spent the last five years hopping from one place to the next, renting cheap apartments month-to-month, all reminiscent of an emergency exit. Easy to flee. Unbothered by being left at the drop of a hat.

  He touched the split skin on his cheek where Connor Michaelson had landed the sharp point of his elbow three days ago. Erik tore the tape with his teeth before placing two small pieces over the wound. Dark red peeked around the edges, but he looked acceptable.

  Acceptable enough.

  “Ricky… Remy, Richard… Something?” Erik trailed his fingers across the back of the couch as he crossed from the bathroom to his bed, snatched his phone off the dresser and opened the email from Styx Tattoo Parlor. Appointment Confirmation: Erik O’Malley consultation with— “River,” he said softly, and quirked a brow. “Who the fuck names their kid River?”

  He tucked black jeans into a pair of ratty, steel-toed combat boots that’d carried him from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Phoenix to Portland, and seven months ago, from Portland to Seattle. Those boots had been with Erik at seventeen, running from ghosts, and they were still with him now at twenty-two, living a new life in a rainy city.

  Sometimes he wondered how far they’d let him go before they fell apart.

  Erik swiped through River’s Instagram, looking from one tattoo to the next. Forest scenes. Watercolor animals. An owl’s face on the back of someone’s neck. River was talented, but talent aside, he was the only artist available now, since Erik’s go-to guy had moved to New York over the weekend.

  The newest picture on River’s Instagram was of a detailed sleeve boasting colorful wildflowers threaded with thorny vines. Distantly, Erik was impressed. Presently, Erik was sore and tired, but he didn’t want to lose his deposit, and if he di
dn’t leave now, he probably wouldn’t leave at all.

  One deep breath later, Erik was shrugging on a tattered denim jacket and locking his apartment door behind him.

  “Erik!” Sally Tam, the matriarch of Thai on the Fly’s family business, adjusted her hair net as Erik appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She jutted her small chin at him and smiled. “Anything I can leave on your doorstep? We’ve got extra red duck.”

  “I’ll take it if you’re offering. Any chance I can steal a couple bags of ice when I get back?”

  The sweltering, crowded kitchen was adjacent to the stairwell. Beyond it, a counter with two registers and a seating area with booths lining both walls led to the street-facing front doors. He leaned against the staff exit until the heavy door swung open and smiled his thanks when Sally nodded to him, flapping her hand in an exaggerated wave as he left.

  Sally never questioned the bruises or blood. She never asked why he paid rent exclusively in cash, or why he sometimes masked a limp. Neither did her son, or her husband, or any of the other Tams who rushed around the restaurant.

  Sometimes he heard them gossip, tracked their curious gazes when he crept past the kitchen before sunrise on Saturday mornings, but no one asked, and if no one asked, he didn’t answer.

  January nipped his jaw, the familiar breath of a new year. People hustled down the sidewalk, hopped on the Metro, and slid into Ubers as they navigated the soggy, chilly streets.

  Thankfully, Styx wasn’t too far of a walk.

  Erik strode past the bagel shop two blocks from his apartment and crossed the street onto Broadway. Eccentric artwork spanned the sides of buildings—a silhouette of dancers captured in neon spray paint, mandalas etched in pastels over brick and concrete. Capitol Hill never seemed to sleep. There were always open eyes watching people come and go, immortalized in a three-story mural, hidden under an umbrella, or flicking here and there on the faces of passersby. It was a neighborhood in Seattle where people found themselves stumbling along after midnight, looking for a food truck or a quick fuck. Or maybe that was just Erik.

  He stopped by a locally owned coffee shop three doors down from Styx and ordered something obscenely sweet to counter the three extra shots of espresso he asked for.

  “Quad avalanche white mocha with hemp?” The barista, a young woman with fiery hair, offered a thin smile as Erik took his drink. “I guess it’s never too early for four shots, huh?”

  “Never,” Erik rasped. His lips quirked in a half smile, but the barista’s eyes fluttered from his mouth to his busted cheek, and finally to his hand. He watched her follow the outline of the letters on his knuckles, B I T E, and lifted two fingers off his cup to wave. “Have a good one.”

  The longer people looked, the more they saw. Bruises over bruises. Scars on top of scars.

  Erik was a walking billboard for the kind of trouble people pretended not to be attracted to. He used to be a reckless kid, self-serving and wild-eyed, and now he was a lawless cage fighter, solitary and unpredictable. He embraced the first-glance assumptions most people made about him and kept the truth to himself.

  The neon sign in the window flickered when Erik opened the door. A customer flipped through a bound portfolio, and a woman stood behind the counter, staring defiantly at a computer screen. He’d met her before, in passing. Cheyenne, he thought. Her eyes narrowed and her face tensed, sculpted with charcoal eyeliner and opalescent highlighter.

  “Who you here to see, sweetie?” She tucked a piece of teal hair behind her ear and eyed Erik over the top of her reading glasses. “Oh, it’s you. Nick’s client, right?”

  “Yeah, now nobody’s client. I have a consultation with a different artist this morning.”

  “I see a lot of faces. Remind me your name?”

  “Erik O’Malley.”

  “Right, right, okay, let’s see…” She clicked around on the computer before her red-painted mouth split into a grin. “There you are. Ten o’clock with River. You won’t be disappointed,” she added quickly. “Got your placement in mind?”

  Erik glanced at his left hand, the one that wasn’t wrapped in medical tape, and nodded. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Perfect. C’mon back, then. I’ll show you to his station.” Cheyenne’s heeled boots click-clacked on the linoleum floor. She held the door for him, and he glimpsed the chunky silver rings on each of her fingers. They walked into the back, a wide-open space divided by waist-high walls that split the room into five private stations. “Second one on the left,” she said.

  Erik glanced at the walls, adorned with flash stencils and original paintings, a few aesthetically pleasing candelabras, and high-resolution photographs of inked bodies.

  “River,” Cheyenne said. “Your client’s here.”

  River’s attention snapped away from a sketchbook. He tilted his head, regarding Erik with a careful smile. Stubble coated his jaw and cheeks. His face was all soft angles and obvious youth, handsome in a way that reminded Erik not to squeeze his coffee cup as tightly as he currently was. He’d seen River before, crouched over a limb with a buzzing tattoo machine in his hand, flashing smiles at clients or sketching at his desk. Fleeting glances during long sessions had usually ended in a half smile or a quick nod, granted after River wiped ink from freshly needled skin or when Erik studied the artwork plastered around his station for a little too long. They’d never spoken, but Erik had noticed him enough to remember the complex collage of tattoos that covered his left arm.

  River bounced a pencil in the hollow of his thumb. “You must be Erik,” he said.

  Glances across the room had not done justice to his eyes, to a look that was both thoughtful and appreciative.

  Erik was suddenly aware that he’d paired a denim jacket with jeans and absolutely hated himself for it, because honestly, who fucking does that? Assholes do. “And you’re River,” he replied, doing what he did best and feigning confidence in the face of something—someone—abruptly and unexpectedly interesting.

  Chapter Two

  River was a creature of habit. He began each day with a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, and his secret indulgence: his daily yoga routine and the local morning news. He liked knowing what was coming next, liked having everything in place in his life, in his station, in his schedule. It made tattooing and art more exciting. Too much of River’s life had been unpredictable in the worst ways, the turmoil of a dysfunctional family shaping over twenty years of his life. Tattoos and clients were variables River looked forward to, their choices and stories unexpected and surprising.

  When River looked up to meet the eyes of his new client, though, he was caught off guard.

  “So, Erik”—River swallowed and scooted back on his stool, adopting nonchalance—“you’ve been working with Nick, right?”

  “Who up and left, yeah.” Erik had a good voice.

  River remembered him; it would be hard not to. It was nice to put a name and a body—a fantastic one at that—to the possessor of an undeniable physicality he’d been secretly thinking of as “dragon dude.” A good voice with a gorgeous face, even marred by the tape on his cheekbone. A face meant for breaking things. Were he ever to touch it, cupping that cut-glass jaw, he imagined he’d come away with his palm bleeding.

  River had never met anyone who wore confidence and warning at the same time, and certainly not in denim on denim. The curve of Erik’s mouth was less than what River would categorize as a smile, just a quirk on the right, but it was clear from Erik’s eyes that River’s gaze wasn’t unwelcome. He took his time, from the top of Erik’s battered boots and back to those eyes. Everything underneath them was hidden, barely masking the tight energy and elegance of a honed physique.

  Across the room, raucous laughter spilled from another artist’s station. River snapped back into the moment. He gestured toward his chair, all burning cheeks and aborted movements.

  “So. What were you thinking of?” River put his pencil down, flipped his sketchbook shut, and took a moment to look over
Erik’s exposed ink to get a sense of his style. The tribal black dragon on his neck told a story: this was someone used to pain. Lettering across his knuckles, indicators of either impulse control issues or someone chasing a certain kind of high.

  Or River was full of shit.

  “Here,” Erik said, fishing his phone out of his back pocket. His thumb moved over the screen, unlocking it with practiced flicks. “Something like this.” The glass screen was shattered in a starburst, and under it, a stylized dragon in all black. “There’s a few.” Erik cleared his throat. “I’m not married to anything, design-wise, but I want this kind of dragon.”

  River darted a glance up. Erik’s face was a study in contradictions, tight-jawed and warm-eyed. His posture, coiled predator and lean strength, was still and careful. River swiped gingerly, mindful of the glass splintered under his thumb.

  “So, color? Black and gray?”

  “Yeah, black and gray,” Erik said. “I don’t want it small. I’m thinking about this size, maybe bigger.” He held his hands about eight inches apart. His hands were big. Capable. River’s fingers wanted to search out calluses on them, to have them seek him out as well, his rough edges, River’s well-worked skin and bones.

  He steered his gaze from Erik’s hands back to his face and nodded. “Where at?”

  Erik rolled up his sleeve, exposing pale, unmarked skin. “Coming down my arm and onto the back of my hand. Head up and tail down.”

  Or we could reverse that. River barely bit the words back, but not the image they made, and not the whispered thought of how his hips would bruise, pulled back against Erik’s.

  “Yeah.” River turned, picking up his pencil blindly. Christ, he needed to slow the fuck down. “I can come up with some rough sketches if you like. How attached are you to these, stylistically?”

  “I was looking through your Instagram,” Erik said. “The memorial skull you posted; I liked that one. Something about it…”

  “Sharp edges and curves,” he said.

  Erik cocked his head.

  River picked his own phone up from his table. He opened Instagram, navigating to the right picture. “See, how I’m juxtaposing the angled lines here with softer edges fading in and out? It creates an interesting visual effect, almost like weaving, which makes the play with the chiaroscuro different as well. Is that maybe what drew you to this one?” He handed his phone to Erik, aware that they were now each holding the other’s.