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DECAY

NOAH

The Tattooist!

I hated that name. It felt like a mockery. A cheap imitation of what I could have been.

The tattoo wasn’t the point. The meaning behind it was the whole fucking point.

I growled, crumpling the paper, slamming it onto the desk. The name felt wrong. Stupid. A joke. It was like he was mocking me—mocking my art, everything I had carved out of blood and brilliance.

I wanted Ryden Sinclair to write my story. All I got was this pathetic waste.

My mother’s laughter filled my head, growing loud, louder.

“Your identity is just as pathetic as you are.”

I forced myself to breathe, forced the tremor out of my fingers, but the sound of her—soft, cold, delighted by my pain… it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I had sent my story to Ryden Sinclair, because I knew he had been hunting me. Because he was intelligent enough to deserve to write my story. But the one who exposed me to the world… was not Ryden.

It was this man. Thatcher Perry.

A nobody. He twisted my truth into cheap compulsion. He reduced my craft to a caricature.

What he wrote made me into just another insane murderer. A cliché. A monster scribbled out by fear-driven minds.

I wasn’t like them. The others.

I was different. I was better than them—better than everyone—and I’d prove it to them.

My breath came hard, shoulders tense, jaw locked so tight it hurt.

I stood and let my gaze drift to the photo on the wall. My father’s picture. My adoptive father. The only man who had ever looked at me and seen something worth his time. He stood in the picture with that practiced smile, hand on my shoulder, pride in his eyes.

He was a troubled man, but he was a good father to my brother and me.

I stepped closer, fingertips brushing the frame.

He had taught me discipline. Precision. The art of being untouchable. And he had taught me another lesson… about how easily admiration could turn to fear… and fear, to hatred.

He would’ve hated this. The name. The insult. The way they were trying to define me.

He would’ve told me to fix it.

And I would. I would do anything for my father. I’d do everything to make him proud.

This was the man… who killed my mother, the same man who created a ghost out of her. But at least, she was only a fucking ghost now.

I still remembered the night when he gave me a chance at life.

It was like any other night. My mother was drunk, and she was smiling when the man walked in. I knew where I should go into the closet when the men came. It was always dark, suffocating.

“Do you want to come with me? My house is bigger, and you’ll be safe there,” he had said, my mother’s blood still on his hands. He looked completely calm even then, like he hadn’t just murdered her.

I was scared, but I was also curious. I nodded.