Mischief

He swore he’d never touch her. She swore she’d never let him stop.

Tindra
Everyone in my family treats me like a fragile thing.
My father, who missed the first fifteen years of my life and has been overcorrecting ever since. My grandfather, who built an empire and won’t let me anywhere near it. My mother, who knows exactly what I’m doing with Bodul and pretends she doesn’t.
They think they’re protecting me. They have no idea I’ve been protecting him from them.
Nearly a year of stolen nights. Locked doors. His shirt on my floor, his hands on my hips, his name the only secret I’ve ever been good at keeping.
Then my father walked in.
The screaming. The fists. The emergency kirkja. The choice they tried to make for me. I survived all of it—and so did he.
What I didn’t survive was the phone call that pulled him out of my bed in the middle of the night afterward. The two days he disappeared. The split lip and bruises he came home with and the lie he tried to tell me about where they came from.

Or the woman who bumped into me at a coffee shop yesterday and said she had a feeling we’d be seeing each other again.
I’ve grown up in this club. I know exactly what that means.

Someone’s coming for me.
Someone’s already gotten to him.
And the only way we make it out the other side is if the boy with the buried name finally tells me who he really is—before they make him choose between his blood and mine