Mischief (Raiders of Valhalla: Prospects #2)

Prologue

Bodul

The phone goes off just past two-thirty in the morning, and I know before I touch it that the life I buried has climbed up out of the ground and is standing at the door.

Tindra's asleep on my chest.

One leg thrown over both of mine, her hand fisted loose in the cotton over my heart, her hair stuck to the sweat between us and caught at the corner of my mouth.

She sleeps the way she does everything, like she owns the ground under her and dares it to shift.

Her weight holds me down to a bed I have no right to be in, in a room in the back of a clubhouse where the president's granddaughter isn’t supposed to be, wrapped around a prospect who isn’t supposed to look at her, much less touch her.

I've spent nine months learning what makes her tick.

The exact weight of her thigh slung over mine.

The heat that pours off the back of her neck when she's deep enough down that nothing in the world can reach her, and the little catch she makes on the inhale to go with it.

Nothing except a phone buzzing face-down on the nightstand.

I don't reach for it.

I lie there and stare at the ceiling and tell myself it's a wrong number.

Maybe a drunk with the wrong contact, anything at all, and the buzzing stops.

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and Tindra murmurs something into my chest that isn't a word.

Then it starts again.

Same rhythm. Same patience.

The demon of my past knows I'm awake now.

And he’ll keep doing this until I answer, because he’s never stopped doing anything until it was done.

I ease her off me by inches.

I've gotten good at this over nine months, sliding out from under a sleeping woman without waking her.

I hate that I'm good at it, hate every skill this thing between us has forced me to build.

I lift her thigh with two fingers under the knee and set it down on the mattress.

I peel her hand off my chest one finger at a time.

She makes a low sound and turns her face into the pillow, reaching into the warm dent where I was.

I do the only thing I can, which is put the pillow in my place so she has something to hold.

She takes it.

She pulls it in against her body and goes still, and I stand there in the dark for one second too long, hating a pillow with my whole chest for getting to stay when I have to go.

I take the phone into the bathroom.

The door shuts softly behind me. The fan goes on so its noise covers whatever's coming, and I look at the screen in the white light off the mirror.

I don't have the number saved.

I don't need to. I burned it out of my own head years ago, and my body remembers it anyway, the way your hand remembers a stove.

I answer because if I don't he'll call the club's line next.

"Son."

The word doesn't belong in his mouth.

My whole life I'd been boy—not a name, not a son, just a thing he hadn't bothered to love.

So when he says son, my gut goes cold before my head catches up.

He only softens his tone when he’s about to take something.

Older than I remember. Wetter, like he's talking around a cigarette, a bad tooth, or forty years of being exactly who he is.

But underneath the wear,, it's the same voice that used to come up the stairs of the house in Duluth, the one that told me to hold still, this won't take but a minute.

The voice my body braces for before my ears even catch it.

My reflection goes the color of the sink.

"You've done well for yourself." I hear him settle in, get comfortable, the wet drag of a breath pulled deep. "A patch, almost. Riding with real men. And such."

He lets the pause stretch, the way he builds everything, on purpose and slow.

"Such pretty company."

The floor goes out from under me.

I put a hand flat on the counter to keep myself standing and I make my voice into the flat dead thing I trained it into the day I put a new name on and rode south with everything I owned in a duffel bag.

"How did you get this number?"

He clicks his tongue against his teeth, a sound I'd know in my sleep. "Now, is that any way to talk to your father?"

"Let me ask again. How the fuck did you get this number?"

He laughs, and the laugh turns into a cough, and the cough goes on long enough that some sick reflex in me nearly asks if he's all right.

I hate the reflex more than I have ever hated anything.

Proof that no matter how far south I ride, some part of me is still a kid on those stairs, still loving the man the way you love a house you grew up in,, even after you know what happened in every room of it.

"Doesn't matter how I got it," he says when he's done.

"What matters is I've got it, and I know where you are.

I've seen you, Bodul. Turned your back on your own blood to go play biker with strangers.

After everything I gave you. You don't get to leave, boy.

Nobody leaves. You'll remember that, or I'll make you. You don’t get to walk away from what you are.

From what I built. Blood doesn't retire, boy.

You'll come home, or I'll bring the family to you. "

I don't say anything.

There's nothing to say to a man who's telling you he's been watching you and letting you feel it, letting the knowledge crawl up your spine one vertebra at a time.

"You look good," he says, almost kindly. "You look like your mother."

"Don't."

"She'd be proud, is all I'm saying. Her boy, running with a real crew. She always did want more for you than I could?—"

"You do not," I say, and my voice cracks down the middle and I let it, because there are two names in the world that can do that to me and he just reached for one of them, "get to talk about her."

Silence on the line.

The fan roars.

Through the door, faint, I hear the bed creak, hear Tindra turn over, hear her say my name into the dark in a voice thick with sleep, half question, and my whole body leans toward the sound of it like a plant toward a window.

I press my forehead to the edge of the mirror.

I close my eyes and I wait for my father to do what he came to do.

He doesn't make me wait long.

"Marit's asking for you."

And there it is.

The second name. The only other one that can cut me open.

My sister.

Half my blood and twice my heart, the last person alive I would walk back into hell for, and he knows it.

He’s always known it, it’s the one card he’s held my whole life and he’s never once been too proud to play it.

"She's not doing so good, son." The wet drag again. "You'd know that, if you called. If you hadn't run off and left her in it. You ever think about that? You, down there in the sunshine, and her still up here in the cold with me?"

My hand closes into a fist on the counter.

I think about her every fucking day.

The ache of her, seven years old when I left with her hair in two crooked braids I never learned to do right.

Sixteen now. Sixteen in that house, with him, and I told myself she'd be all right because I sent money and called when I could and swore leaving was the only way to make myself into something that wasn't him.

Every time I told myself, I knew better. I knew I was leaving her behind to save my own skin and told myself it was the only way I could survive.

"What do you want?"

"There's people," he says, and now the wetness is gone from his voice and what's underneath is cold and businesslike.

The real him, the man who ran crews, moved product, looked at his own children and saw inventory, "who'd make sure Marit was taken care of. Real generous people. She'd never want for anything again. Best doctors money buys. Set for life, and you too, if you played it smart."

The businesslike voice. Best doctors, set for life. He’s talking about my sister like a line item, the same way he'd once talked about me.

"Say it plain. What do you want, and what happens to Marit if I say no."

"An introduction." Light. Easy. Like he's asking me to pass the salt.

"That's all. These people I know, they've got an interest in your new friends.

The Raiders of Valhalla. Specifically in a certain family that runs the whole thing.

Old man named Runes. His boy Tor. And Tor's got a daughter, I'm told.

" A pause, and I hear the smile come into it, and I want to reach through the phone and tear it off his face.

"Pretty girl. Runs a coffee shop, of all things.

Sleeps somewhere she shouldn't, from what I know. "

Everything in me goes to ice.

"You bring me to the right room," my father says. "You open the right door. And Marit's taken care of, and you walk away clean, and nobody ever has to know that the great Raiders of Valhalla let a Krause ride right up into the middle of them and never smelled it."

I stare at my own face in the mirror.

Krause.

The name I cut off myself with a dull knife and left bleeding on the side of a road in Minnesota.

The name none of them know.

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.