Cover Work

In Rue Sorel's harbor city, every intimate encounter leaves a permanent pattern on the skin. Desire, tenderness, contempt, power, and grief remain legible. The marks cannot be removed — only covered.

Rue is the district's finest cover-up artist. Their own arm stays sleeved, hiding a mark they covered alone at twenty-two and reworked for fifteen years without reading it again.

Then Yann arrives with a faint pattern no one can explain. Across the sittings, Rue recognizes an impossible echo of the buried mark. To cover it, Rue must first read it — and let a client ask why the city's best reader has refused their own skin.

A novel about craft, bodily truth, and the mercy of being read correctly.