Page 22 of Mischief

A week, and the week's almost gone.

My black eye's gone yellow-green now, healing ugly. Lip's mostly closed. But the way I hold my left side gives me away every time I forget to fake it, and this is a room full of men who notice things for a living.

Kraken catches me first.

He's at the end of the bar with a coffee, big and gray-bearded, patient as a mountain, Njal, Bjorn, and Everly's old man.

The kind of member who's seen the club through everything and doesn't waste words.

He watches me set a case down wrong, the breath hiss out of me when the weight pulls at my ribs, and he doesn't say anything for a long moment.

He lets the silence stretch until I have to look at him. "Who worked you over, prospect?"

Not unkind. Only direct.

"Personal thing." I straighten up slowly. "Family. It's handled."

"Family." He turns the coffee cup a slow half-circle on the bar, the way older men do when they're deciding how hard to push. "Didn't know you had any. You never talk about them."

"On purpose." I hold his gaze and don't offer anything more.

He looks at me a while longer.

There's nothing hostile in it, but there's nothing easy either.

Kraken's the kind of man who tucks a worry into his back pocket and keeps it there, and I've handed him one to carry.

"A man rides off on personal business and comes back looking like you do," he says, "and won't say who did it. That's the kind of thing a club likes to know about. We take care of our own trouble. Even a prospect's." He lets that sit. "Whatever you're carrying, you carry it toward us, not away. That's how this works. You've been part of the club for enough years to know better, too."

"I hear you," I tell him, and I do.

It guts me, because there's no version of bringing this to them that doesn't end with me dead, exiled, and Tindra exposed.

He nods like the matter's closed, but I know it isn't. Not with Kraken.

Logi's less gentle about it.

He finds me an hour later out back by the bikes, and Logi's got a mouth on him and a talent for saying out loud what everyone else keeps behind their teeth.

He leans against the wall and looks at my ribs like he can see through my shirt to the mess underneath.

"You know what a prospect with a secret family is?" he says, lighting a cigarette. "A liability. That's the word Fenrir'd use. You show up beat to hell, won't say by who, won't say why. For all anybody knows, you brought something ugly right up to our door."

"I didn't bring anything to anyone." The words come out harder than I mean them to, and I feel my ribs protest the breath it takes to say them.

"Maybe." He blows smoke sideways. "But you're asking us to patch a man we don't actually know. You get that, right? The cut's not a participation trophy. We put our name on you, we're saying we know exactly who you are and we'll bleed for you. Hard to say that about a guy who came back from nowhere with somebody else's fists all over his face."

He's not wrong. That's what makes it unbearable.

He's right to push. This is the club doing exactly what it should, and it's exactly what would've sniffed out my father if I'd let it near the truth.

I can't give them the chance, because the chance is Tindra's life.

"When I've got something to say," I tell him, "you'll be the first to hear it."

"Sure I will." Logi grinds the cigarette out under his boot and claps me on the shoulder, on the bad side, not by accident, and I don't let him see how bad it affects me. "Get your story straight before somebody with a gavel asks you for it, prospect. That's all I'm saying."

He goes back inside, and I stand out there in the heat with my ribs screaming and my father's deadline ticking somewhere behind my sternum.