Page 4 of Mischief

Not Runes, not Tor, not one of the brothers I've bled beside through years of proving I'm somebody worth trusting.

Not her.

Not Tindra, who is on the other side of that door right now with her arm around a pillow that's pretending to be me, who thinks the worst thing about me is that her father would put me in the ground if he found us, who has no idea, none, that the worst thing about me is a man on a phone in Minnesota with my sister's name in his mouth like a hook.

"No," I say.

"Anders, I expect?—"

"No. You can call me a hundred more times, the answer stays no. You show up down here, same answer. Whatever these people promised you, whatever they've got you thinking, it's no, and if you ever say that girl's name to me again, I will drive up there myself and end this."

"And what?" His voice doesn't move, flat and sure as a man reading a grocery list. "Kill me? You? You couldn't do it at fourteen when I had my hands on your mother, and you sure as hell can't do it now. You're not built for blood, boy. You never were. Why do you think you ran? Men who can end a life don't run from it."

I don't answer.

Because I’ve thought about killing my father every day since I was old enough to think it, and he's right, I've never once believed I could go through with it.

But here, in a bathroom with the fan roaring and the woman I love twenty feet away, some cold part of me is ready to do what I should’ve done years ago.

He hears the silence.

He's always been able to hear the silence.

"Here's what's going to happen," my father says, and the businessman is all the way out now, smooth and sure. "You're going to come home. Two days. That's all I'm asking. Two days, you sit down, you hear these people out, you look at what they're offering, and you thinkrealhard about your sister sitting in thathouse waiting on a brother who swore he'd come back for her and never did."

"And if I don't?"

"Then the next call I make isn't to you." He says it gently. He says it like a kindness. "It's to a man named Tor. And I tell him, really slow, exactly who's been sleeping with his little girl. I tell him the name. I tell him the family you come from. I tell him what we do and who we do it for, and I let him decide what to do about the snake his club took in."

The fan roars.

Through the door, silence now.

She's gone back down.

Sleeping deep, holding the pillow, trusting the whole world because she has never once in her charmed and guarded life had a reason not to.

Her father built a wall around her out of an entire motorcycle club, and she has spent ten years safe inside it.

Safe enough to be reckless.

Safe enough to hand her whole heart to the one man in the club who rode in wearing a lie.

I think about Tor.

I think about the look on his face if my father makes that call.

Not the fists. I can take the fists. I've been taking fists my whole life, and they're the first language I ever learned.

What I can't take is the moment Tor looks at his daughter and understands the man she chose came into his house wearing a fake name to get close to exactly what my father's describing.

Her, standing in the middle of it, learning what I am from his mouth instead of mine.

I think about Marit in two crooked braids, about her, now sixteen and asking for me.

"Two days," my father says. "Come home. Hear them out. Nobody has to get hurt. Everybody wins."

I open my eyes.