Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Bodul
The room they let me use has never felt smaller than it does the morning after they beat me in it.
Somebody wrapped my ribs while I was half out of it in kirkja, taped them tight, and I don't know who and I won't ask, because asking means talking, and talking means somebody has to look at me, and nobody in this clubhouse wants to look at me right now.
I lie on the narrow bed and stare at the water stain on the ceiling and hurt in places I'm running out of names for.
The eye's swelling shut again, the one that finally healed.
The lip's split back open.
My nose crusted with blood I didn't bother washing off because washing means the mirror and the mirror means seeing what her father did to me.
None of it compares to the deeper ache, the one that sits under my sternum like a swallowed stone and has her name.
Tindra.
Twenty feet of hallway and one club ruling away, and she might as well be on the moon.
I close my good eye and I let myself have it for exactly one minute, the memory of her, the weight of her on my chest, her mouth at my ear telling me we were fine.
We were fine.
For one hour we were the most fine I've ever been in my life.
Then the door opened.
I get up because lying here is worse, and I move through my day like a man walking on broken glass, because I basically am.
The club moves around me like I'm not there.
That's the ruling, unspoken but total.
I kept my spot and my breath, and in exchange I get to be a ghost in the only home I've ever chosen.
Men who used to toss me a nod look through me now.
The easy insults stop, which is worse than the insults.
Nobody wastes shit-talk on a dead man walking.
I haul what they tell me to haul, I clean what they tell me to clean, and I keep my eyes down, and every time a door opens somewhere in the building my whole body turns toward it hoping it's her and praying it's not.
Because if it's her, I can't have her.
And not having her while she's standing right there might be what finally kills me.
* * *
Geirolf finds me out by the fence line late in the afternoon, where I've gone to be alone with a cigarette I'm not really smoking.
He's been around for a while, married to Astrid, and he leans on the fence beside me and looks out at nothing for a while before he says anything.
"You know you're not the first," he says finally.
"First what?"
"First prospect to lose his mind over a club daughter.
" He pulls a flask from his cut, takes a pull, offers it.
I don't take it. "Happens more than you'd think.
These girls grow up around men like us, they get a taste for it, and some poor bastard with a half-earned patch decides he's the one gonna be different.
" He shrugs. "Sometimes it even works out.
Couple of the old ladies inside started exactly like you and her.
Sneaking. Getting caught. Living through it.
Hell, there was a time with Astrid when I thought Fenrir was going to murder me.
Now look at us, with a son and a second baby on the way. "
For the first time since we were caught, something in my chest that isn't pain flickers.
"So it's not always?—"
"Don't." He says it gently, but it lands hard. "Don't you go getting hope off what I said, son. Because I wasn't finished." He caps the flask. "Those other girls? They were daughters. Nieces. Somebody's kid. Tindra's not somebody's kid."
Regnor comes up on my other side then, unhurried, the way he does everything.
He's Everly's husband, family by marriage, and family means he's got the standing to say what Geirolf's been circling.
"Tindra is the princess," Regnor says. "The only one.
Runes built this whole club, and Tor's blood runs it, and she's the single thread of the next generation they've got worth guarding.
You understand? Every hope those two men have for what they built lives in that girl.
Astrid is a princess in her own right, but not the way Tindra is. "
"I know what she is to them."
"You don't, though." Regnor's voice stays level, but there's iron under it. "You know she's the Prez's granddaughter. You don't know what it cost this club to get her back."
Something in how he says it makes me go still.
"Get her back from where?"
The two of them trade a look over my head, the look men use to decide how much to hand a stranger, and whatever passes between them.
Regnor lands on mercy, or maybe on enough truth to make me understand what I've stepped into.
"Not my story to tell," he says. "But Tor missed the first fifteen years of that girl's life, and he didn't miss them because he wanted to.
And when she and Meghan came back into his life, this club swore something over them that none of us ever said out loud but every man in there would die to keep.
" He holds my eyes. "So, when you climbed into her bed, you didn't just break a rule about prospects and daughters.
You walked into the one place these men have promised themselves nothing bad would ever reach her again.
And you're a man who showed up beaten half to death and won't say by who. "
The stone under my sternum turns over.
Because he's right, and he doesn't even know how right he is.
I'm not only the prospect who touched a club princess.
I'm the prospect who touched the princess while carrying the exact kind of darkness this whole family reorganized itself to keep away from her, and if they ever learn that, Geirolf's talk about old ladies who lived through it stops meaning anything at all.
"Why are you telling me this," I say.
Geirolf pushes off the fence.
"Because you took Tor's fists and didn't lift a hand," he says.
"A guilty man fights back. A man who's just stupid in love takes it.
" He claps my good shoulder, softer than Logi did.
"Doesn't change the ruling. Doesn't mean you get her.
But a couple of us noticed. That's all. Keep your head down, your hands off her, and maybe, someday, you earn a little ground back. "
They leave me at the fence with my dead cigarette.
Keep your hands off her.
If they knew what keeping my hands off her leaves her open to, they'd never let me out of their sight again.
* * *
My father calls at nine that night.
I'm sitting on the floor of my room with my back against the bed when the phone lights up, unknown number, and I already know.
I know before I answer, the way you know a storm off the pressure in your ears.
"Rough couple days, son?"
His voice slides into my ear, warm and awful, and the floor tilts under me.
"How—"
"I told you I've got eyes on you. Didn't I tell you that?" A wet, satisfied breath. "My people say it's gone real quiet for you down there. Nobody talking to you. You skulking around like a whipped dog. Looks to me like your little biker family found out you're not the golden boy after all."
I say nothing, because there's nothing to say that doesn't give him more.
"I don't know what you did," He goes on,"and I don't care much.
But here's what it tells me. It tells me the ground's gone soft under you.
It tells me you don't have as many friends down there as you thought.
And a man with no friends, no leverage, and a whole lot of secrets—" the smile comes into his voice— "that's a man who should be a whole lot more reasonable than you've been. "
"I'm not giving you anything."
"No?" A pause, built to cut, the way he builds all of them.
"Then let me give you something instead.
Marit went to a party last weekend. Nice house.
Nice people. The kind of people I've been telling you about.
" I hear him settle back, comfortable, a man holding all the cards.
"She looked real pretty. Everyone said so.
One of the buyers took a real shine to her. "
The room goes white at the edges.
"You son of a bitch?—"
"She's sixteen, Anders. She photographs well. And she's got no big brother up here to do anything about it, on account of he ran off to play biker in Florida and got himself beat stupid over some girl he's not even allowed to have.”
His voice drops, and the warmth drains out of it, and what's left is the man from the staircase.
"The clock's not stopped just because your life fell apart. You bring me into that club or I sell your sister to the first man who bids. You've got days, not weeks. Think hard about who you can still save."
The line goes dead.
I sit on the floor with the phone in my shaking hand and I don't move for a long time.
Marit at a party. A buyer taking an interest. My baby sister with her flat eyes, sixteen and photographing ‘well’, and me a thousand miles away, forbidden from the one woman who's the target, distrusted by the only men strong enough to end this, carrying it all alone in a bedroom they'd throw me out of if they knew.
Every road still ends in the same place.
Only, I can't see it yet.
* * *
I stay strong for nearly a week.
Six days of not going to her.
Days of hearing her name in other men's mouths, at the bar, in the lot, Tindra this and Tindra that, and every time it hits me like a punch to the gut.
She's back at the shop, somebody says. Throwing herself into work like a woman with something to prove.
Aren, Runes and Fern’s son, says that she won’t talk to her father.
Something ugly and hopeful twists in me at that, because it means she's still angry, still fighting, even if she's not fighting for me anymore.
I tell myself staying away is the one gift I've got left to give her.
I tell myself the ruling keeps me breathing, and a breathing man twenty feet away is worth more to her than a dead one.
I tell myself a lot of things in the middle of the night, staring at that water stain.
None of them stop my heart from cracking straight down the center, one hairline at a time, every hour I don't reach for her.
* * *
She comes to me on the seventh day.