Page 23 of Mischief

I think about how every road out of this ends in the same place.

* * *

It’s family dinner at the clubhouse tonight.

I don’t know who started it, if it was Charm or Fern, but it’s been going on forever.

We do it a couple times a month, a real sit-down at the clubhouse, long tables and too much food, the whole club and their families packed in loud and warm.

It's what makes the club feel like what it's supposed to be instead of what it is.

I'm working it, of course.

Prospects work the family dinners, hauling platters and clearing plates, invisible in plain sight, which suits me fine because it means I get to be in the same room as her for a couple hours and nobody thinks twice about it.

Tindra's at the center of the long table where she belongs.

She's got her grandfather on one side and her father on the other, Runes and Tor, the two poles the whole club turns around, and she's holding her own between them the way she always does, quick and sharp, giving nobody an inch.

Runes says something dry and she laughs, head back, and the sound of it carries down the whole table.

I have to look at the platter in my hands so I don't look at her too long.

This is the part nobody warns you about. Loving somebody you're not allowed to look at.

She's club royalty and I'm the prospect clearing her grandfather's plate.

Hierarchy speaking, we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.

I refill Runes' water. I take Tor's empty platter. I move around her like she's furniture, and she treats me like furniture back, perfect, flawless, the two of us performing strangers so well I almost believe it myself.

Almost.

Down the table, talk turns the way it always does at these things, to the club, to business dressed up as family gossip.

Somebody asks Runes if it's true he's cutting back his miles, and the whole table goes a shade quieter to hear the answer.

Runes cutting back is a big deal.

He waves it off with a joke about his knees, but I catch the look that passes between him and Tor, quick, loaded, a conversation they've clearly had more than once.

Runes is getting old.

Everyone at this table can see it, and nobody says it.

The question of who holds the gavel when he sets it down sits under the whole dinner like a held breath.

I'm a prospect. It's not my business who leads.

But I watch Tor's jaw when the subject comes up, notice him not look at his father, and I understand I'm seeing the club's next ten years get decided in the space between two men not talking about it.

Because twice, when nobody's watching, her eyes find mine for half a second.

I catch Tor watching her once.

Nothing strange in that, a father watching his daughter.

But then his eyes move, slow, following the line of where hers had gone, and they land on me for a moment before I drop my gaze to the plates in my hands, and something in my chest goes cold.