My Heart's Tattoo

In Austin, Texas, a man is arrested hours after his lover’s body is found. He isn’t just grieving. He’s already searching for the truth.Jed Taylor has never faced his life alone. He has Raelynn, his fiercely protective sister. He has friends who have leaned toward his gifts rather than away from them. He has always had people willing to stand beside him, even through the worst loss of his life: the death of Grayson, his first partner, whose passing Jed foresaw with a clarity his clairvoyance made devastating and inescapable. That network of love shaped who Jed is, a former Army combat medic, steadier than his circumstances, carrying a gift he never asked for with the quiet discipline of someone who has learned to live inside uncertainty.Darren McAllister’s life has run in the opposite direction.He lost his mother young. His father was the one person who truly saw him, and then he was gone too. In college, Darren loved someone too afraid to love him back openly, and belonged to a community that chose fear and judgment over the young man who needed neither. He married, convinced himself it would help, and discovered prescription pills did what the marriage couldn’t: they made the noise quieter. To Austin, Darren McAllister is a successful executive, a devoted husband, a polished presence in every room he enters. Inside that image is a man repeatedly failed by almost everyone and everything that should have held him.When Jed and Darren find each other, neither of them is prepared for what changes.For Darren, Jed is the first person in years who sees him without conditions, fear, or agenda. For Jed, Darren is something he has never quite encountered: love that has already been through fire and hasn’t stopped burning. Their connection is immediate, complicated, and genuine in ways neither man can fully comprehend. But Darren is still married. The stakes of being known are not theoretical. And just as Darren begins to choose his truth at last, Jed’s long-dormant visions return with terrible force. He sees Darren’s death before it happens with the same precision he once saw Grayson’s.He can't stop it.When Darren is found dead of an apparent overdose, the official story closes quickly. But Jed knows the shape of things that don’t add up, and so does Owen, a detective who has been pulling at the same threads from the other side of the law. Darren had offshore accounts. He was days away from leaving his marriage. And Jennifer, his wife, has her own version of what happened, one she has been very careful to control.As Jed and Owen’s investigations move on a collision course toward the same truth, the full weight of Darren’s final days begins to surface: the betrayals, the pressures, the people who knew more than they ever admitted.Jed pursues the truth with Raelynn beside him, guided by grief, love, and something harder to name, a flicker of presence in the weeks after Darren’s death that refuses to be explained away. Darren seems close. Not as memory. As something more insistent than that.My Heart’s Tattoo is part love story, part ghost story, part mystery, and entirely about what it means when two lives shaped by opposing forces of love and loss find each other too late and not too late at the same time. It is a story about the people who build us up and the systems that grind us down, about what survives when everything meant to protect a person has already failed them, and about the question that follows Jed long after the investigation ends:When love leaves that kind of mark, does it ever truly go silent?Perfect for readers who love:Queer fiction with emotional depth and genuine dramatic stakesLGBTQ+ love stories where the relationship is forbidden, hard-won, and fully aliveMulti-perspective narratives that reward close readingMysteries driven by grief, injustice, and the refusal to accept a convenient answer Read more