Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Tindra
The clubhouse is empty for the first time in the whole time I've been sneaking into it.
Half the club drove out to the lake this afternoon.
Coolers and kids piled in, Bjorn's boat hitched to the back of somebody's truck, a whole caravan of them gone until morning.
Mom tried to get me to come.
I told her I had inventory at the new shop and watched my own mother pretend to believe me, which she's gotten very good at.
And now here I am, where I swore I wouldn't be, breaking the one promise I keep making to myself.
Bodul's room sits at the end of the hall past the bays, a converted storage closet barely big enough for the bed, a dresser, and him.
It's the least private space a person can have.
A room the club hands a prospect and takes back on a whim, and we both know it, which is why we never do this here.
Tonight we’re doing it here.
Because everyone's been gone for an hour and I can't stop.
Bodul came back from wherever he went with a wall behind his eyes, and I've been trying to climb it.
The only time it comes down is when he's inside me.
Now he's stretched out on his back with me tucked into his good side, both of us bare and cooling under the ceiling fan.
His heart slows under my ear.
For one stolen hour, the whole world is the size of this terrible little room, and I've never been happier or more afraid in my life.
"I could stay here," I say into his chest. "Just like this. Forget the shop, forget all of it. Live in a storage closet with a prospect. My grandfather would love that."
His chest jumps under me, half a laugh, and his hand traces up and down my spine, slow, like he's memorizing the knobs of it.
"You'd last a week." His voice is a low rumble I feel more than hear. "No espresso machine. You'd stage a coup by Friday.."
"I'd bring the espresso machine, duh." I walk two fingers up the center of his chest.
"There's no room for the espresso machine." He catches my hand and flattens it over his heart.
"I'd get rid of the dresser." I prop my chin on his sternum so I can look at him.
Gods, he's beautiful like this.
The wall down, the eye nearly healed up, that rare soft thing in his face he only ever lets me see.
"You don't need clothes anyway," I tell him. "I like you better without them."
He smiles, and for once it reaches all the way up, crinkling the corner of his good eye, and I want to climb inside it and live there.
Then it fades.
The way it's been fading for two weeks now, his eyes drifting up to the ceiling, and I feel him go somewhere I can't follow him to.
"Hey." I flatten my palm over his heart. "There it is again. Where do you keep going?"
"Nowhere." His hand starts moving on my spine again, a little too smooth, a little too fast.
"You said that last time. And the time before that."
I keep my voice soft, because I've learned the hard way that pushing him makes the wall higher, and I'm so tired of the wall.
"You came home hurt and told me about your father and your sister, and then you closed a door somewhere inside you and you've been bracing it shut ever since."
My thumb moves over his heart, back and forth.
"I'm not asking you to open it all the way. I'm asking you to stop pretending it isn't there."
His throat works.
His hand goes still against my back.
"If I told you everything," he says, so low I have to hold my breath to catch it, "you'd never look at me the same again."
"That's not true." I say it fast, before he can let himself believe it.
"You don't know that. You don't know what's behind the door, Tindra."
His voice catches on my name and cracks down the middle, and his arm hauls me in tighter, like he's bracing for me to get up and walk out this second.
"There's things about me. About where I come from. If they ever came out, your family would?—"
"My family would what?" I push up onto my elbow so I can see all of him. "Bodul. Look at me."
He does.
"Whatever it is, whatever you're so sure it is, I chose you.
When we started this I chose you, and I've chosen you every single day since, in secret, in a storage closet, with my whole family a wall away.
And I'd do it again tomorrow. There is nothing behind that door that changes one thing about that. "
He looks at me for a long moment.
His eye goes bright and wet at the rims, and my heart climbs into my throat, because this is it, he's finally going to let me carry it with him.
"Everyone's at the lake," he says instead.
He pulls me back down against his chest and presses his mouth into my hair.
"We're fine. For once, we're actually fine. Let me just have this."
And I let it go.
Because I love him, and because we're safe, and because I believe him.
I believe we're fine.
That's the last thing I believe before the door flies open.
There's no knock.
No key scraping the lock to warn us, no boots in the hall, no mercy of a half-second to move.
One breath, we're wrapped up in each other in the dark.
The next, the door swings wide and the hall light crashes across the bed, across both of us, across everything, and my father is standing in the doorway.
Nobody moves.
It's the worst second of my life, that frozen second, all three of us caught in the light like animals on a road.
I watch it wreck him.
I watch my father's face go from tired, to confused, to something that has no name as he takes in the bed, the bare shoulders, and his daughter tangled up with a half-dressed prospect in the one room he'd never think to look.
I see the exact instant the bottom drops out of his world, because it's the same instant it drops out of mine.
"Daddy, I?—"
I'm already lunging for the sheet, dragging it up over both of us, my pulse slamming so hard I taste it at the back of my teeth.
"Daddy, wait?—"
He doesn't wait.
He crosses the room in two strides and rips Bodul out of the bed by one arm.
And Bodul goes.
He doesn't fight it, doesn't set his feet, lets my father haul two hundred pounds of him down onto the floor like he's nothing, and I'm screaming.
I don't even know what I’m saying, clawing up onto my knees with the sheet clutched to my chest as the first punch flies.
The sound of it is the part that guts me.
Not a movie sound.
A wet, heavy, sickening crack of my father's fist against a face that's barely finished healing.
Bodul's head snaps sideways.
Blood comes, dark and fast, and he doesn't lift a hand.
He doesn't lift a single hand to stop it, only folds down over his broken ribs and takes it, and my stomach drops away entirely as I understand what I'm watching.
He's going to let my father beat him to death before he'll raise a fist against the man who made me.
"Stop!"
I'm off the bed, sheet forgotten on the floor, throwing my bare body between them.
"Daddy, stop, you're going to kill him?—"
"Get out of the way, Tindra."
My father's voice comes out low and shaking, a voice I've never once heard from him.
"Get out of the way, put some clothes on, and get the fuck out of here."
"No."
I flatten both hands on his chest and shove with everything I've got.
He doesn't move an inch.
He's a wall, pure fucking muscle, and I'm shoving a man who taught himself not to move.
My arms are shaking with the useless effort of it.
"No, you listen to me. You don't get to do this."
"He put his hands on you."
His chest heaves under my palms, his eyes locked on Bodul bleeding at our feet, refusing to come to me.
"I put my hands on him."
It tears out of my throat, raw enough to scrape, and my father goes dead still.
"Do you hear me? Me. For nine months I chose this, in secret, right under your nose, because I knew you'd do this. Exactly what you're doing right now."
"Nine months."
He says it like the words are cutting his mouth on the way out.
Behind me I hear Bodul spit blood onto the floorboards, the wet drag of him trying to breathe through a nose that might be broken, and I can't turn to look at him, or I'll shatter where I stand.
"Nine months. Under my roof. A prospect."
"A man."
The tears come now, hot and fast, blurring the whole room, and I don't waste a hand wiping them.
"A good man. The best man I know. And you're beating him half to death on a room floor because I fell in love and didn't ask your permission first."
Something moves in the doorway.
I didn't hear them come.
But they're here now, drawn by the noise, Uncle Fenrir, Kraken, and Magnus filling the frame.
I watch the news of it travel across their faces the same way it traveled across my father's.
The Prez's granddaughter.
A prospect.
Caught.
And I feel it leave my hands, all of it, everything.
Because the second another patch lays eyes on this, it stops being a family fight.
It's club business now.
And in this world, club business gets settled in one room, behind one door, that I have never once in my life been allowed to walk through.
"Kirkja, now," my father says.
He won't look at me.
His knuckles are split and running red, and he won't look at me.
"Now. Somebody get Runes back from the lake."
"Daddy."
"Get dressed, Tindra."
He still won't turn his head, and something in me caves in on itself at that.
This man, who's spent ten years unable to take his eyes off me, is suddenly unable to put them anywhere near me.
"You've done enough tonight."
* * *
They put Bodul in the chapel and they leave me in the hall.
Of course they do.
For fuck’s sake, I’m twenty-five and Bodul is twenty-eight. It’s not like I’m a seventeen year old girl.
Kirkja is for patches.
I'm blood, I'm the Prez's granddaughter.
And still, when the heavy door swings shut, it shuts with me on the wrong side of it.
The way it always has.
The way I've spent years beating my fists against.
They're in there deciding his fate right now.
And mine.
And I'm out here in yesterday's clothes with my arms wrapped around my own ribs, close enough to catch the low churn of men's voices through the wood and not one single word of what they're saying.
Runes comes tearing in off the highway within the hour.