The tattoo artist had checked his driving license—twice, just in case—and wished him a happy eighteenth birthday before sketching out the delicate, intricate design. Theo’s back was outlined from the nape of his neck to the soft hollows at the base of his spine. Black linework and gray shading, highlights whiter than his pale skin, the curve and fine strokes of feathered wings.

“Quite a choice for your first tattoo.” The artist spoke with disbelief and a hint of challenge.

Theo stood up straighter and tried to summon the confidence he was supposed to have as a Beaumont—the confidence his father had demanded his whole life and shattered irreparably as he was handcuffed and dragged away in shame. “I can handle it, thank you.”

Halfway through the tattoo, he wasn’t as sure.

He remembered too many bad things and wanted to put them into every line scored on his back like the slicing of a dull knife. Theo had carried pain for years—the pain of a family which didn’t know how to love him, and the pain of his father’s backhand when he wasn’t good enough, the pain of a secret inside of him which he hated. The pain of a mother who looked away too many times.

He winced as the needle pricked his too-bony ribs.

“Wish I could do this for you.”

Theo turned his head, just enough to see Tom’s anxious eyes, and smiled reassuringly...as much as he was able. Tom had always protected him. His face, normally rough-cast and immobile, showed deep frown lines and a quiet unhappiness at seeing Theo hurt.

“Thanks.” Theo pressed his face into the cushioned chair. “But this is...this is something I need to do.”

“Why?” Tom burst out. “It looks good, but...why? You’ve already—”

Theo understood what was unspoken. He had already been through too much.

But here he was, newly eighteen and manic with it, and he had lived every single day as someone else. He had been trapped, caged. He had been given the best of things, all of his family’s money propping him up with clothes and lacrosse gear and fine dining and anything, everything they thought would make them look good. He had defined himself by that money, and the money made him seem—it made him cruel. It gave him permission to look down on everyone else, because he couldn’t admit for so long that he was so unbearably unhappy.

That obsession with money and all the trappings of luxury was what finally brought his father down. Greed, the desire for more, always; tricking Baltimore’s elite into investments which yielded nothing but a realization that they had been conned. Money destroyed his father, and it would have been funny, an amusing cosmic justice, if his father’s schemes hadn’t wrecked Theo’s life.