Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Bodul
Cracked ribs don't care that a prospect isn't allowed to be hurt.
Four days home, and I'm still moving like an old man.
There's no hiding it, not from a clubhouse full of men who've all been beaten enough times to know exactly what it looks like on somebody else.
I keep my breathing shallow, my face flat, and I work my ass off however I’m needed to.
Hauling kegs I've got no business hauling, wiping down the bar, running errands for patched men. Doing whatever the club asks of me, because that’s my fucking job.
Every night I wrap my own ribs the way Tindra did the first night, alone in the dark of the room they let me use with my teeth gritted, doing for myself what she'd do gentler.
Every morning I unwrap them and press my fingers to the bruising and tell myself it's fading, it's mending, I'm getting stronger.
And every morning some clock in the back of my skull counts down one more day against the deadline my father hung over me in that kitchen.
A week, and the week's almost gone.
My black eye's gone yellow-green now, healing ugly. Lip's mostly closed. But the way I hold my left side gives me away every time I forget to fake it, and this is a room full of men who notice things for a living.
Kraken catches me first.
He's at the end of the bar with a coffee, big and gray-bearded, patient as a mountain, Njal, Bjorn, and Everly's old man.
The kind of member who's seen the club through everything and doesn't waste words.
He watches me set a case down wrong, the breath hiss out of me when the weight pulls at my ribs, and he doesn't say anything for a long moment.
He lets the silence stretch until I have to look at him. "Who worked you over, prospect?"
Not unkind. Only direct.
"Personal thing." I straighten up slowly. "Family. It's handled."
"Family." He turns the coffee cup a slow half-circle on the bar, the way older men do when they're deciding how hard to push. "Didn't know you had any. You never talk about them."
"On purpose." I hold his gaze and don't offer anything more.
He looks at me a while longer.
There's nothing hostile in it, but there's nothing easy either.
Kraken's the kind of man who tucks a worry into his back pocket and keeps it there, and I've handed him one to carry.
"A man rides off on personal business and comes back looking like you do," he says, "and won't say who did it.
That's the kind of thing a club likes to know about.
We take care of our own trouble. Even a prospect's.
" He lets that sit. "Whatever you're carrying, you carry it toward us, not away.
That's how this works. You've been part of the club for enough years to know better, too. "
"I hear you," I tell him, and I do.
It guts me, because there's no version of bringing this to them that doesn't end with me dead, exiled, and Tindra exposed.
He nods like the matter's closed, but I know it isn't. Not with Kraken.
Logi's less gentle about it.
He finds me an hour later out back by the bikes, and Logi's got a mouth on him and a talent for saying out loud what everyone else keeps behind their teeth.
He leans against the wall and looks at my ribs like he can see through my shirt to the mess underneath.
"You know what a prospect with a secret family is?" he says, lighting a cigarette. "A liability. That's the word Fenrir'd use. You show up beat to hell, won't say by who, won't say why. For all anybody knows, you brought something ugly right up to our door."
"I didn't bring anything to anyone." The words come out harder than I mean them to, and I feel my ribs protest the breath it takes to say them.
"Maybe." He blows smoke sideways. "But you're asking us to patch a man we don't actually know.
You get that, right? The cut's not a participation trophy.
We put our name on you, we're saying we know exactly who you are and we'll bleed for you.
Hard to say that about a guy who came back from nowhere with somebody else's fists all over his face. "
He's not wrong. That's what makes it unbearable.
He's right to push. This is the club doing exactly what it should, and it's exactly what would've sniffed out my father if I'd let it near the truth.
I can't give them the chance, because the chance is Tindra's life.
"When I've got something to say," I tell him, "you'll be the first to hear it."
"Sure I will." Logi grinds the cigarette out under his boot and claps me on the shoulder, on the bad side, not by accident, and I don't let him see how bad it affects me. "Get your story straight before somebody with a gavel asks you for it, prospect. That's all I'm saying."
He goes back inside, and I stand out there in the heat with my ribs screaming and my father's deadline ticking somewhere behind my sternum.
I think about how every road out of this ends in the same place.
* * *
It’s family dinner at the clubhouse tonight.
I don’t know who started it, if it was Charm or Fern, but it’s been going on forever.
We do it a couple times a month, a real sit-down at the clubhouse, long tables and too much food, the whole club and their families packed in loud and warm.
It's what makes the club feel like what it's supposed to be instead of what it is.
I'm working it, of course.
Prospects work the family dinners, hauling platters and clearing plates, invisible in plain sight, which suits me fine because it means I get to be in the same room as her for a couple hours and nobody thinks twice about it.
Tindra's at the center of the long table where she belongs.
She's got her grandfather on one side and her father on the other, Runes and Tor, the two poles the whole club turns around, and she's holding her own between them the way she always does, quick and sharp, giving nobody an inch.
Runes says something dry and she laughs, head back, and the sound of it carries down the whole table.
I have to look at the platter in my hands so I don't look at her too long.
This is the part nobody warns you about. Loving somebody you're not allowed to look at.
She's club royalty and I'm the prospect clearing her grandfather's plate.
Hierarchy speaking, we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.
I refill Runes' water. I take Tor's empty platter. I move around her like she's furniture, and she treats me like furniture back, perfect, flawless, the two of us performing strangers so well I almost believe it myself.
Almost.
Down the table, talk turns the way it always does at these things, to the club, to business dressed up as family gossip.
Somebody asks Runes if it's true he's cutting back his miles, and the whole table goes a shade quieter to hear the answer.
Runes cutting back is a big deal.
He waves it off with a joke about his knees, but I catch the look that passes between him and Tor, quick, loaded, a conversation they've clearly had more than once.
Runes is getting old.
Everyone at this table can see it, and nobody says it.
The question of who holds the gavel when he sets it down sits under the whole dinner like a held breath.
I'm a prospect. It's not my business who leads.
But I watch Tor's jaw when the subject comes up, notice him not look at his father, and I understand I'm seeing the club's next ten years get decided in the space between two men not talking about it.
Because twice, when nobody's watching, her eyes find mine for half a second.
I catch Tor watching her once.
Nothing strange in that, a father watching his daughter.
But then his eyes move, slow, following the line of where hers had gone, and they land on me for a moment before I drop my gaze to the plates in my hands, and something in my chest goes cold.
I tell myself it's nothing. He looks at every prospect. I'm being paranoid, running on no sleep, a deadline, and guilt.
I tell myself that, and I don't quite believe it.
* * *
She slips out toward the kitchen when the plates are being cleared, and I've got an armful of them heading the same way.
It isn't planned, or maybe it is, maybe some reckless part of me timed it, because I'm past the point of being smart.
The kitchen's empty. Everyone's out at the tables, loud and full on Meghan's cooking.
Only her, running water over a stack of glasses she doesn't need to wash, and me, setting the plates down on the counter, the door swinging shut behind us on all that noise.
"Hey," she says, low, not turning around.
"Hey." I set the plates down soft so the clink doesn't carry.
"You've been carrying platters with two broken ribs all night." She shuts the water off. "I've been watching you not wince for hours now. It's the worst thing I've ever seen."
"I'm fine." I lean my hip against the counter to take the weight off the bad side, which gives the lie away, and she catches it.
"You're not fine. You're the opposite of fine.
" She turns then, and her eyes go over my face the way they did the night I came home, checking, always checking, and her voice drops even softer.
"I hate this. I hate watching you clear my grandfather's plate like you're nobody.
You're not nobody. You’ve been part of this club for years, and you should have your damn patch by now. "
And that's what breaks me, days of holding it all in, the club closing in, my father's clock running down, and this woman looking at me like I'm the center of the world instead of the help.
I close the space between us before I can talk myself out of it.
I get one hand on her jaw and I kiss her, careful of the lip that's still healing, and she makes a small sound against my mouth.
She grabs a fistful of my shirt and kisses me back like she's been starving for it as long as I have.
Her back hits the counter. My ribs light up and I don't care.
For three seconds, four, there's no club, no father, and no deadline.
Only her mouth, her hands, and the fact that she chose me, out of every man in this life she could've had, she chose the prospect clearing her plate.
Then footsteps in the hall, and we break apart fast, and she spins back to the sink.
I grab a dishtowel and we're two feet apart and busy with nothing by the time the door swings open.
It’s Magnolia, arms filled with glasses, and she barely looks at us.
But my heart's slamming, and Tindra's knuckles are white on the edge of the sink.
We both know how close that was.
"Go," she breathes, when the woman's gone back out. "Before somebody who's actually paying attention walks in."
I go.
I don't see Tor in the hall until I'm almost past him.
He's leaned against the wall near the kitchen door, a beer in his hand, and I don't know how long he's been there.
Here's the whole problem, I don't know how long he's been there.
He's not looking at me.
He's looking at the kitchen door I came out of, and then, unhurried, he looks at me, and his face doesn't do anything at all.
"Prospect," he says.
"Sir." I keep my voice even and my eyes off the kitchen door.
"Long night." He takes a pull off the beer, eyes steady on mine. "You look wrecked."
"Just the ribs, sir."
"Mm." He pushes off the wall and steps past me, close, and pauses at my shoulder, and for one endless second I'm certain he knows, certain the next thing out of his mouth ends my life. "Get some rest," he says instead. "Can't have a prospect falling over at my wife's dinner."
He walks back out to the tables, easy, unbothered.
I stand in the hall with my pulse in my throat and no idea whether I survived something or started it.
* * *
My phone goes off while I'm loading the last of the kegs, close to midnight, everyone gone home.
Unknown number. A photo, no words.
It takes my brain a second to make sense of it, and then the bottom drops out of me all over again.
It's Tindra.
It's Tindra outside her shop, in the daylight, locking up, a to-go cup in one hand and her keys in the other, caught from across the parking lot by somebody standing where I stood the morning I couldn't make myself go in.
She has no idea she's being photographed.
She's only closing up her shop, tired and beautiful, none the wiser, and somebody was close enough to catch the color of her eyes.
The phone buzzes again. A text, this time.
Time's up, son. She keeps nice hours. Real regular. Be a shame if somebody who wasn't family started keeping them too. Call me.
My hands are shaking so hard I nearly drop the phone.
They're here.
Not coming, not a threat up north, here, in Tallahassee, close enough to my woman to count her lashes, and my father wants me to know it.
He wants me to feel exactly how little of a wall is left between Tindra and the dark I crawled out of.
I look around the empty lot like I'll catch them at it, like there's somebody I can put my hands on right now, but it's only me and the kegs and the hum of the security light.
They took that photo hours ago.
They could be anywhere.
They could've been in her shop today, ordering a cortado from her, watching her laugh with a customer, and she'd have poured it and thanked them and never known she was serving the type of people her own father spent his youth being sold to.
The thought puts acid in the back of my throat.
I stand in the empty lot with the photo burning a hole in my hand and I contemplate it one more time.
The same thing I've done every day since Duluth, and it comes out the same way it always does.
Marit up north in that house, sixteen and going flat behind her eyes, learning to be worth a lot to the family.
Tindra down here with a lens already on her, closing her shop at the same time every night, regular as a clock, easy to take.
The club at my back, starting to smell the rot on me, ready to put a bullet in whatever brought this to their door and not much slower to put one in the man who carried it in.
And me in the middle of all of it, a prospect with a stolen name and healing ribs, out of road and out of time, holding a secret that gets somebody killed no matter which way I let it fall.
Tell the club, and they protect Tindra, but my father sells Marit, and me they either kill or cast out for what my blood is.
Say nothing and cooperate, and I hand these people the daughter of a man who went through the same shit, and I become everything I've spent my whole life running from.
And if I do nothing at all, my father does something instead, and the choice gets taken from me.
There's no clean way through. I've turned it over a thousand times looking for the door and there isn't one, there's only which people I'm willing to lose.
I delete the photo so I never have to see it again.
I know, standing there in the dark with my ribs aching and my father's voice in my pocket, that whatever I do next takes something from me I won't get back.