Page 34 of Mischief

For one hour we were the most fine I've ever been in my life.

Then the door opened.

I get up because lying here is worse, and I move through my day like a man walking on broken glass, because I basically am.

The club moves around me like I'm not there.

That's the ruling, unspoken but total.

I kept my spot and my breath, and in exchange I get to be a ghost in the only home I've ever chosen.

Men who used to toss me a nod look through me now.

The easy insults stop, which is worse than the insults.

Nobody wastes shit-talk on a dead man walking.

I haul what they tell me to haul, I clean what they tell me to clean, and I keep my eyes down, and every time a door opens somewhere in the building my whole body turns toward it hoping it's her and praying it's not.

Because if it's her, I can't have her.

And not having her while she's standing right there might be what finally kills me.

* * *

Geirolf finds me out by the fence line late in the afternoon, where I've gone to be alone with a cigarette I'm not really smoking.

He's been around for a while, married to Astrid, and he leans on the fence beside me and looks out at nothing for a while before he says anything.

"You know you're not the first," he says finally.

"First what?"

"First prospect to lose his mind over a club daughter." He pulls a flask from his cut, takes a pull, offers it. I don't take it. "Happens more than you'd think. These girls grow up around men like us, they get a taste for it, and some poor bastard with a half-earned patch decides he's the one gonna be different." He shrugs. "Sometimes it even works out. Couple of the old ladies inside started exactly like you and her. Sneaking. Getting caught. Living through it. Hell, there was a time with Astrid when I thought Fenrir was going to murder me. Now look at us, with a son and a second baby on the way."

For the first time since we were caught, something in my chest that isn't pain flickers.

"So it's not always?—"

"Don't." He says it gently, but it lands hard. "Don't you go getting hope off what I said, son. Because I wasn't finished." He caps the flask. "Those other girls? They were daughters. Nieces. Somebody's kid. Tindra's notsomebody's kid."

Regnor comes up on my other side then, unhurried, the way he does everything.

He's Everly's husband, family by marriage, and family means he's got the standing to say what Geirolf's been circling.

"Tindra is the princess," Regnor says. "The only one. Runes built this whole club, and Tor's blood runs it, and she's the single thread of the next generation they've got worth guarding. You understand? Every hope those two men have for what they built lives in that girl. Astrid is a princess in her own right, but not the way Tindra is."

"I know what she is to them."

"You don't, though." Regnor's voice stays level, but there's iron under it. "You know she's the Prez's granddaughter. You don't know what it cost this club to get her back."

Something in how he says it makes me go still.

"Get her back from where?"

The two of them trade a look over my head, the look men use to decide how much to hand a stranger, and whatever passes between them.

Regnor lands on mercy, or maybe on enough truth to make me understand what I've stepped into.