Chapter 5 #2
He doesn't look at me either as he passes, this man who set me on my first bike, who calls me his little raven, who stood in the corner of my shop two weeks ago with something close to pride on his weathered face.
He walks past his own granddaughter like I'm a coat rack, and the chapel door swallows him too.
I slide down the wall until I hit the floor.
And I shake.
Not the delicate way. Not one brave tear tracking down one cheek.
My whole body goes, my teeth knocking together like the hall's gone subzero when it hasn't, my hands trembling so hard I have to trap them under my thighs to keep them still.
The tears come the ugly way, silent and endless, running off my jaw and soaking cold into the collar of my shirt while I strain at the door for any sound of what they're doing to the man I love.
Mom finds me there.
She came back with Runes, and she doesn't waste a word on it.
She only folds herself down onto the filthy hallway floor in her good clothes and gathers me into her chest and holds me while I come apart in her arms.
And I let her.
Because she's my mother, and I have never needed her more than I do on this floor.
"You knew," I say into her shoulder, my voice in pieces. "You always knew. About him."
Her arms cinch tighter around me. "I knew."
"Then why didn't you say anything?"
She goes still for a moment, her hand smoothing down my hair the way she used to when I was small enough to fit in her lap.
"Because you looked happy," she says finally. "For the first time in ages, you looked so genuinely happy. And I wasn't going to be the one to take that from you."
Her voice thickens and drops.
"I hoped I'd have longer before the rest of them found out. I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry it went like this."
And I cry harder into her, ugly and wracking, my whole chest hitching with it.
Because a room away, they're carving up my happiness without me, and my own mother couldn't stop them.
There is nothing, nothing on this earth I'm allowed to do but sit on a floor and wait.
The door opens after what feels like a year.
Men file out, and I'm on my feet before I know I've stood, hunting their faces for anything and finding only that shut, blank, club-business nothing they all pull down like a shade.
Then Bodul comes out between two of them, and my knees nearly buckle.
His face is ruined all over again.
The eye that finally healed is swelling shut before my eyes.
His lip is split fresh, blood drying dark down into the stubble on his chin, and he's cradling his ribs the exact same way he cradled them the night he rode home from wherever he'd been.
His one good eye finds me across the hall.
And it's full of something I can't read, something that looks too much like goodbye.
"Bodul—"
I start toward him.
"Don't." My father's voice, low, right behind me. "Tindra. Don't."
I round on him.
My grandfather stands at his shoulder now, and the whole weight of the club fills the hall at their backs.
I plant myself in the middle of all of it with my chin up and my face soaked, smaller and angrier than I've ever been in my life.
"What did you do to him?"
"He keeps his position in the club." It's my grandfather who answers, his voice all gravel and exhaustion. "For now. Prospects have been ended for a whole lot less, girl. He's breathing, and that's mercy."
His old eyes travel over me, and there's grief buried in them, and somehow that's worse than if he'd shouted.
"You're not to see him. That's the ruling. He stays clear of you, you stay clear of him. Or the next kirkja doesn't end with him walking out of it on his own feet. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
"You can't?—"
"It's already done."
Tor.
My father.
Not shaking anymore, only hollowed all the way out.
"It's decided."
Decided.
The word goes through me like a crack splitting across a frozen lake.
I look around the hall at every one of them, my father and my grandfather and the men who've taught me so many life lessons.
All of them fresh out of a room where they cut my whole life into pieces and dealt them out without asking me a single question.
And something in my chest that's been bending for twenty-five years finally gives way all at once.
I stop crying.
That's the strange part, how fast it goes.
The tears dry up in an instant, like my body understands this moment needs something harder and colder than grief.
"You fucking decided something for me, huh?"
My voice comes out low and level, steadier than any part of me feels, the flat calmness you find at the very bottom of the worst thing there is.
"All of you. In there. About my life. About who I'm allowed to love."
I find my father's eyes and I hold them, refusing to let go until I watch him flinch back from me.
"You've spent ten years telling me you're protecting me. That you missed my whole childhood and you're making it right. Well, look around you, Daddy."
My hand shakes as I lift it toward Bodul, and I let it shake, let every man in this hall watch it shake.
"This is what your protection looks like. A good man bleeding on your floor, and your daughter learning that after all of it, after everything, she still doesn't get one single vote in her own life."
My voice doesn't break. I won't let it.
"You didn't protect me tonight. You showed me exactly how much you trust me. Which is not at all."
Nobody says a word.
My grandfather's jaw works side to side.
My father's throat moves like he's trying to swallow something with teeth in it.
And still not one of them tells me I'm wrong.
Because I'm not, and the cruelest part of being right is standing here watching it change absolutely nothing.
Bodul stares at the floor.
He hasn't lifted his eyes to me once since the ruling.
And that, more than the fists, more than the door, more than the kirkja I wasn't allowed inside, is what tells me how bad this truly is.
Because the man who once held my face and told me to keep my eyes open so he could watch me fall apart won't lift his head to look at me now.
They take him one way.
My mother takes me the other.
And as they walk him off down the hall, one arm locked around his broken ribs, his eyes down like a man who's already surrendered to something he can't name out loud.
Two things hit at once, right there in the wreckage of the worst night of my life.
I've lost him.
Exactly the way they want me to.
And whatever's behind his door, whatever he was one breath away from finally handing me before the world caved in, it's still out there.
Still coming for us.
They've torn down the one person who was standing between it and me, and they think they've done me a kindness.