Page 13 of Mischief

She picks at the chipped polish on one thumbnail and doesn't answer for a while, and when she does her voice comes out older than sixteen, worn smooth, rehearsed.

"He takes me places now," she says. "Nice places. Dinners. He says I'm good at it. Making people comfortable, getting them talking." She shrugs one shoulder, and the casualness of it turns my stomach worse than tears would. "He says I've got a gift. That I'm going to be worth a lot to the family."

Worth a lot. I hear my father's mouth in hers, his exact arithmetic, and I want to put my fist through the wall behind her head.

"That's not a gift," I say. "That's him getting you ready to sell."

"Don't." Her eyes come up fast, and for one second there's a flash of the kid I left, furious and terrified at once. "You don't get to ride in here after all these years and tell me what my life is. You left. You got out. Good for you." Her voice cracks on the last word and she hates that it does, I can see her hate it. "Some of us didn't have a bike and a fake name waiting."

For a second something moves behind the flat, something young and drowning, and she almost, almost lets me see the whole of it.

Then the front door bangs, and whatever I saw goes back under.

She straightens off the counter like a soldier hearing a boot in the hall.

"You shouldn't have come," she says, fast and low, and it's the truest thing she's said. "Whatever he offers you, don't. Just get back on your bike."

"Marit—"

"He's here."

My father fills the kitchen doorway, and eleven years fall away like they were nothing.

Bigger than his voice on the phone, though smaller than the giant on the staircase.

Gone gray and gone soft in the gut, but the eyes are the same, cold and clean and already doing arithmetic on me, adding up what I'm worth.

Behind him in the hall I clock two men I don't know, big, still, hands loose at their sides.

Men who get paid to be a wall until someone tells them to be a fist.

"There he is." My father spreads his arms like he'd hug me if we were people who did that. "My boy. Rode all this way." He looks me over, the road on me, the exhaustion. "You look like hell."

"Say what you brought me here to say." I stay planted in the middle of the kitchen and don't move toward the chair he wants me in.

"Sit down first. Marit, get your brother a?—"

"She doesn't need to get me anything." I don't sit. "You told me I had two days. You've got until I'm bored. Talk."

He smiles, and it's Marit's flatness with teeth in it.

He pulls out a chair and sits himself even though I won't, because he wants me standing while he's easy, wants the room arranged so I'm the one with nowhere to put my hands.

"There's people," he says, "with an interest in your new friends."

And he lays it out, and it's exactly as blank as it was on the phone, and that vagueness is the worst part.

People. That's all he'll give me.

People with money, people with reach, people who've been watching the Raiders of Valhalla and have decided there's something inside that club they want.

It's Tindra. It was always going to be Tindra.

He doesn't say buyer. He doesn't say what they want her for.

He doesn't have to, because I've spent years inside that club, and I've heard the story the way you hear the stories that hold a place together, in pieces, over fires, in the half-sentences men use for what they can't say all the way out loud.

I know what the Raiders did, years back, to an operation like the one my father's fronting for now.