Prologue #2
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 think real hard about your sister sitting in that house 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.
I look at the man in the mirror, and for the first time in years, I can see the resemblance he threw at me.
My mother's mouth over his cold eyes, the jaw that belonged to his father and his father's father before him.
A whole bloodline of men who spilled blood and never once ran from it.
However the next few weeks fall, there's no path through them where I come out still clean.
The wall's already breached.
He's already inside it. He was inside it the second the phone rang.
The only choice left to me is what it costs and who pays, and I already know.
The way you know the floor is there in the dark, that the bill is going to come due in blood, and that I’m going to be the one holding the knife when it does.
"Two days," I say.
My own voice, coming from very far away.
"There's my boy," my father says, warm as a hand on the back of your neck, and the line goes dead.
I stand there.
I stand there with the phone in my hand and the fan roaring, and my whole life splits down the middle.
I turn the fan off, rinse cold water over my hands, and then my wet hands over my face.
I breathe until the shaking stops, until the wild thrash behind my ribs goes back down into the cold flat place I built for it when I was fourteen.
The place I've let go soft for nine months, because a girl with an attitude and her raven hair looked at a prospect nobody trusted and decided he was worth the risk.
I dry my hands on the towel that smells like her and open the door.
The room's dark, warm, and full of the sound of her breathing.
She's on her side, curled around the pillow, and in the almost-light off the window, her face goes the way it only goes when she's all the way under.
Open. None of the sharp edges she wears like a jacket.
Now, the woman underneath the attitude, the manager's keys, the one nobody but me ever gets to see.
I stand at the edge of the bed, look at her, and I make myself a promise I already know I'm going to have to break.
I take the pillow.
She frowns in her sleep and reaches, and I put myself back where the pillow was, and she finds me and climbs onto my chest.
She fits there like she was made for me, her hand fisting loose in the cotton over my heart, her hair in my mouth, her weight holding me down to the one clean life I have ever gotten to touch.
"Where'd you go?" she mumbles, not awake, not really.
"Nowhere," I tell her, into her hair, and it's the first lie.
The first of the ones that are going to end us, or save us, and I don't know yet which.
"Go back to sleep."
She sighs, and sinks, and trusts me all the way down into the dark.
I lie here and hold her and stare at the ceiling and memorize this feeling.
The heat off the back of her neck, the little hitch in her breath, all the math of her, because somewhere north of here my father is already making calls, and somewhere in the next two days I'm going to walk back into the house I clawed my way out of.
I already know, the way you know your own name, even the buried one, that when I come back to this bed I'll have to look her in the eye and lie about every part of it.
I hold her until the window goes gray.
I don't sleep.
I keep her weight on my chest as long as the dark will let me, because I've done the math, and I know how few nights I've got left.
Nights where she still believes I'm nobody's snake, where the worst thing she can imagine about me is her father, where she lays her whole trusting self across me like I've earned the right to hold it.
And I want every second of it.
Every last one.
Before the name I buried climbs up out of the ground and takes it all.