Page 21 of Mischief

The heat coils tighter and tighter low in my belly with every roll of my hips until it's a live wire, until I'm gasping his name, until it snaps.

It goes through me in waves, and I break above him with my head thrown back and his name in my mouth.

My whole body clenching around him, and he follows me a heartbeat later with a groan he can't hold in.

His hand a vise on my hip, his hips lifting the barest fraction into me before the ribs stop him and I take over, working us both through it slow and deep until we're wrung out and shaking.

I come down onto him, folding to his good side, my head on the shoulder that isn't wrecked, and for a long while neither of us says anything at all.

He strokes my hair.

Slow, absent, his split knuckles catching now and then in the strands.

I lie there with my palm spread flat over his heart, feeling it slam and then gradually slow, and I press a kiss to the unhurt curve of his shoulder and pull the blanket up over the both of us.

"Was that too much for your ribs?" I ask quietly.

"Worth every cracked one." His voice is thick, half gone to sleep already. "Don't you dare feel guilty. That's the first time in days I've felt like a person."

I tuck myself in closer, and I hold him.

I listen to him breathe, slow and even, until sleep finally takes him under.

And I stay awake.

I lie there in the dark with this broken, sleeping man wrapped around me, sated and safe and loved down to my bones.

Underneath all of it, low and cold, the unease I've been feeling won't leave me be.

Because he told me pieces tonight. A father. A sister named Marit. A family that isn't good. And I believe every piece he gave me.

It's the outline of what he didn't give me that keeps my eyes open in the dark.

He came home carrying something. I felt it in the way he held on.

Loving him means I let him keep it, for now, sealed behind that wall he can't climb.

I only hope to the gods I don't find out too late what I let him carry alone.

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.