13. Elara
Elara
The front door shuts behind Brock and takes most of the air in the kitchen with it.
Nothing in you minded me there.
That’s what Gunnar said. Low, right into my ear, in a room where I swear everyone hears everything, and then he walked out before I could tell him exactly how wrong he was.
Which I could have done. Easily. Because here’s the entire truth about Gunnar and that bed — he was tired, the bed was comfortable, I made it comfortable on purpose because that was the whole job of the bed, and comfortable beds are hard to leave.
It’s why alarm clocks are violent. A man who fought getting in and then didn’t want to get out the next morning isn’t evidence of a nest. It’s evidence of good pillows.
Erik never fought getting in.
Erik pulled me in with him.
That little detail is not helping, so it isn’t in the argument. Motion to strike. Granted. Moving on.
Except now Brock’s gone too. Out the same door, after one look through the window and one nod from Leif. That feels weird and I know weird.
And nobody in this kitchen is reacting.
Not in any way and that’s not right. Clearly something is going on and I can’t be the only one that sees it.
I know I’m not because Leif and Brock made that very obvious and obvious shouldn’t get past anybody.
But Erik is still holding that towel like the dishes are important and Rayner has drifted conveniently between me and the window.
Nothing is happening, and all of it is happening very carefully.
These are not relaxed men. These are men doing an impression of relaxed men.
Leif says something to Erik. Low. Too low for me to hear but I hear it just like when Gunnar…
Nope.
“This isn’t going to be good.”
Erik doesn’t answer. The towel starts moving again, slower.
“It’s going to be great,” Rayner says, grinning like a child that just got his wish.
It’s extremely suspicious and I am not willing to let it go.
Who is outside?
Why did Brock leave like that?
What isn’t going to be good?
Why is the biggest one delighted about it?
I need to know dammit. This is a need to know basis and I am the one out of everyone that needs the Cliff’s notes version now. Not the tomorrow that always seems to be the deadline.
The deadline is now.
I open my mouth—
Outside I can hear voices — Gunnar’s, gone flat in a way I’ve never heard it, Brock’s doing its nice-morning thing, and a third one, deep and level and new.
That’s the something no one is saying.
There’s three heartbeats out there.
Three. Through a wall. Heartbeats I counted, without trying.
Not thinking about how I know that.
The third voice says Erik’s name, and the towel stops for good.
“What’s going to be great?” I finally say.
Rayner smiles down at me. “You’ll see.”
And I’ve seen this man happy. He walked three hours through a forest happy. This isn’t that kind of happy. This is almost giddy. This is a man saving a seat for his favorite part. Nothing else in this kitchen agrees with him, and I don’t know which of them to believe—
Boots on the porch. Fast.
The front door doesn’t open so much as surrender, and a man comes through it.
He’s enormous. That’s the first thing — they’re all enormous, I’ve recalibrated my whole scale, and he is still enormous.
Silver hair, short. Black ink climbing up out of his collar, and the collar is pressed.
All of him is pressed. He’s dressed like he’s on his way to run a meeting or a funeral and hasn’t decided which, and he is furious in the most frightening way I have ever seen a person be furious, which is quietly.
He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t need to. The anger comes off him in one straight line, and every ounce of it goes past me like I’m not even here.
I’m just fine with that right now.
“Where is Erik?”
Erik sets the towel down.
He comes around the counter, unhurried, and stops.
And I notice where he stops. He stops in the one spot where a straight line from that man to me doesn’t exist anymore. I see him do it. I understand what it is. I don’t have time to have a feeling about it.
“Vick,” Erik says.
“Three years.” Vick’s voice stays level, every word measured. “Three years and not one word. Last night, six crossings hit my wards. Six. One of them a reading I have never seen in my life. I traveled through the night, and I learned you were alive because my son was standing in my way.”
His eyes never leave Erik. Not even when Gunnar and Brock slip in like bandits.
“So you will tell me where the hell you’ve been. Now. And what the fuck you brought back with you through that crossing.”
“Not here,” Erik says.
“That is not an answer—”
“Not in front of her.”
And that’s when Vick looks at me.
Barely. It is the fastest look I have ever been given — a flick, one line long, and he grunts like I’m not relevant — and his attention closes back over Erik like water.
Her.
I’m the thing Erik won’t discuss. Me.
Erik would rather take that man’s anger straight to the face than say one word about it while I’m in the room.
I don’t know what that means yet. I know it means something.
Vick moves. There was never much kitchen between them, and now there’s none of it.
Gunnar takes one step toward Vick with a face I’ve never seen on him, no grin anywhere in the ruins of it—
“Don’t.”
Erik is having none of it.
And they stop. All of them. Not because they can’t — I have watched these men move a full dinner table like a footstool and treat a door like a suggestion — but because he asked.
I watch four very large men stand down on one syllable and hate every second of it.
Gunnar’s jaw is working. Leif has gone somewhere cold behind his eyes.
And Rayner stopped like he wanted to. He’s the only one in this room who did. He’s watching all of it with the face from before, the saving-a-seat face, which cannot be right, also I cannot deal with whatever that is right now.
Vick takes Erik by the front of the shirt and puts him into the counter.
It’s fast and it’s hard, and on the stove the breakfast Erik never got to finish jumps in its pan, and my own breath does something ugly on the way in.
Erik doesn’t move.
His hands stay down at his sides, open. And that’s the part my body understands before the rest of me does — I have watched this man remove a grown man from my personal space with one arm and no visible effort.
He is not being overpowered. He is choosing this.
He’s standing there with a fist in his shirt, letting it happen, and his voice comes out the same as before.
“Not in front of her.”
Vick’s grip tightens. A seam gives, somewhere.
And I’m scared. Genuinely, correctly scared, and my brain does the math at full speed — that man is twice my size, that man could put me through a wall by accident, Erik can defend himself, there are four men in this room who could end this and were told not to, there is no version of this where I help, I am a writer from Chicago holding a cold coffee—
The mug is on the table. I don’t remember putting it down.
The sound is back under my sternum, low and rolling, and there’s no time for that either, because my feet are already moving, and nobody told them to, and I couldn’t stop them if I tried.
I don’t try.
And then I’m between them.
Staring up at Vick. Right in the eyes.
I don’t know who this man is and I don’t care.
Erik is mine.