Quinn
“I’m sure it’s beautiful, Karim. Thank you. I had a great time catching up.” I gave my old friend, who happened to be a tattoo artist, a quick hug before handing him a big wad of cash. “And thanks for squeezing me in last minute. I really appreciate it.”
My parents had always made it clear that tattoos would make me less desirable, so I’d never gotten one before. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, I discovered, but I had to do what I had to do.
“Are you sure you don’t want to look at it?” Karim checked. He had already asked me a dozen times.
“I’m positive, but thanks.” I gave him a quick smile before I left his studio.
I hadn’t expected the process to be emotional for me. I’d only had the mate mark for 36 hours or so, and I’d only glanced at it a handful of times. When I’d parked in the garage at Karim’s building, though, I’d stopped to really look at it.
It was beautiful. A blue so dark and rich it was almost black, the shimmering marking swirled around the skin behind and underneath my right ear. It looked like the magical tattoo everyone thought of them as, and I loved it.
I’d snapped a picture of it with my phone and wiped away a few tears as I got out of my car and forced myself into Karim’s studio. After I told him to cover up the cotie with something classy, and to make it a surprise, I’d spent the rest of the hour and a half fighting off tears.
There was no question; the wolf in me hated what I was doing. I almost felt like my wolf was mourning the mate mark. Because she was me and I was her, we understood that we had to do this for the sake of our family, but it didn’t make it easy since she felt that Cody was our real family.
My next stop was at the hair salon. Cody had mentioned how much he liked my blonde hair after the party the night before, so I dyed it black—temporarily of course, just to prove a point. It would wash out as soon as I washed my hair.
As I stepped out of the elevator on my floor, I fluffed the side of my hair that the hairdresser had left down, so I could show off both my tattoo and my “new” hair. I steeled myself for a yelling match, because when Cody saw the tattoo, he was going to be pissed.
At least, I hoped he would be. The other option was hurt, and if I saw him hurt, it would make me hurt.
It drove me crazy that I felt so connected to him already, but I did and that was that.
I turned the corner and barely bit back a gasp when I saw him leaning on the wall outside the apartment with his arms folded over his chest. Wearing a white t-shirt that did wonders for those bulging muscles of his and a pair of jeans that made me look at denim in an all new way, he looked pissed.
And he hadn’t even seen the tattoo yet.
Dread filled me, but I marched up to the door like he wasn’t even there and grabbed the doorknob.
“A hooker, Quinn? Really? I thought we were past that.”
Ah, yes. I knew Cody would turn her down faster than I could find an actual hooker, so I’d just offered a girl I knew from the club a few hundred bucks to pretend. I hadn’t sent a hooker because I expected him to invite her in, I sent her to make him more annoyed with me.
The more annoyed he was, the more easily he would be annoyed as I continued to try to bother my way out of his heart.
It would be better for us to part because of irreconcilable differences than because I broke his heart, after all.
I pushed the door open but didn’t respond immediately, and he followed me in.
“You know how important us being soulmates is to me, right?” Cody grabbed my hand, and I pulled it away.
“Of course. But we never made a rule against hookers, or one night stands.” I flashed him a devious smile and waited for the wolf to come out.
Instead of yelling or swearing or growling, Cody took my face in his hands and kissed me.
Wow that man could kiss.
His kissing ability must’ve been a gift from God, because he hadn’t learned by kissing anyone else.
I pulled away after a second and stepped back. He looked and felt and smelled too good, I needed to get away from him before I forgot that I was trying to make him hate me.
“I need to get out of town for a while.” I said sharply. “Are you going to let me leave alone, or are you going to be a caveman about it?”
Spinning away from him and walking quickly toward my bedroom, my heavy-feeling hair brushed against just the one side of my neck. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and then a snarl tore through the room.
“What did you do?”
His hands were on me instantly, yanking me close so he could see the tattoo on my neck that I hadn’t even seen.
I swallowed those stupid emotions that had been giving me grief all morning and put on my brave face.
“I didn’t like it, so I had it fixed.” I lied. I couldn’t tell if my voice was shaking, but Cody was pissed enough that it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t notice.
“You don’t fix a cotie. They’re the physical tie between us and our wolves, not some tattoo you can just cover and change.”
“I told you yesterday, I don’t want to know your shifter slang. This is still my life, and I get to decide what I do with it. I covered the mate mark with a tattoo because I didn’t like it, which is my right. This discussion is over.”
I forced myself to walk at a normal pace, like my heart wasn’t pounding and the wolf in me wasn’t howling at the fact that I’d hurt our mate.
Cody grabbed my hand and spun me around.
“What are you doing?” He demanded. His eyes were wolfy again, and I could practically feel the anger rolling off of him in steaming waves. “We were good last night, what happened?”
His eyes faded back to human, and that massive mountain of a man started to look sort of vulnerable.
Something inside of me wilted.
I couldn’t do it anymore, I wasn’t strong enough to watch his heart fall to pieces while my own was already in a pile of dust on the ground. I had to tell him the truth.
“What happened is that I’m going to be engaged to Travis Childers by the end of the year. How much money will it take for you to sign a document saying that you won’t come after me again, and that I can marry whoever I want?”
The look in his eyes was incredulous.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, actually, I’m not. Everyone has a price, Cody. What’s yours?”
He let go of my hand and folded his arms.
“If I walk away from you I’ll spend the rest of my life fighting my wolf side until the animal in me gets too strong and I go rabid. Do you really think any amount of money is worth dying for?”
I wasn’t going to be able to argue that point, so I ignored it altogether.
“You have two options here. Either you sign the paper and walk away with millions of dollars in your pocket, or I make your life a living hell until you hate me so much that you want to sign it. It’s your choice.”
I started toward the bedroom again, and Cody followed me. When I tried to close the bedroom door in his face, he caught it and held it open.
“You’re assuming that you won’t fall in love with me before you convince me to leave you.”
“My feelings have nothing to do with the situation. And I hope you’re still packed, because we’re leaving town. Where did you say you live again?”
I watched the emotions in his eyes go from determined to cautious. The question had been for his benefit because my dad had texted me his address already, which he’d found through one of his sources.
“I’m not taking you home while you’re determined to get rid of me.” He sounded sure.
It was time to pull out the big guns. As much as I didn’t want to use his family against him, it was the tool that would work the fastest and hurt me the least. Since my hair and the tattoo hadn’t made much of a dent, I didn’t have a choice.
“You don’t have to. I already bought a house in Mount Edge, right on the mountain in the center.”