Page 25 of Mischief

He's looking at the kitchen door I came out of, and then, unhurried, he looks at me, and his face doesn't do anything at all.

"Prospect," he says.

"Sir." I keep my voice even and my eyes off the kitchen door.

"Long night." He takes a pull off the beer, eyes steady on mine. "You look wrecked."

"Just the ribs, sir."

"Mm." He pushes off the wall and steps past me, close, and pauses at my shoulder, and for one endless second I'm certain he knows, certain the next thing out of his mouth ends my life. "Get some rest," he says instead. "Can't have a prospect falling over at my wife's dinner."

He walks back out to the tables, easy, unbothered.

I stand in the hall with my pulse in my throat and no idea whether I survived something or started it.

* * *

My phone goes off while I'm loading the last of the kegs, close to midnight, everyone gone home.

Unknown number. A photo, no words.

It takes my brain a second to make sense of it, and then the bottom drops out of me all over again.

It's Tindra.

It's Tindra outside her shop, in the daylight, locking up, a to-go cup in one hand and her keys in the other, caught from across the parking lot by somebody standing where I stood the morning I couldn't make myself go in.

She has no idea she's being photographed.

She's only closing up her shop, tired and beautiful, none the wiser, and somebody was close enough to catch the color of her eyes.

The phone buzzes again. A text, this time.

Time's up, son. She keeps nice hours. Real regular. Be a shame if somebody who wasn't family started keeping them too. Call me.

My hands are shaking so hard I nearly drop the phone.

They'rehere.

Not coming, not a threat up north, here, in Tallahassee, close enough to my woman to count her lashes, and my father wants me to know it.

He wants me to feel exactly how little of a wall is left between Tindra and the dark I crawled out of.

I look around the empty lot like I'll catch them at it, like there's somebody I can put my hands on right now, but it's only me and the kegs and the hum of the security light.

They took that photo hours ago.

They could be anywhere.

They could've been in her shop today, ordering a cortado from her, watching her laugh with a customer, and she'd have poured it and thanked them and never known she was serving the type of people her own father spent his youth being sold to.

The thought puts acid in the back of my throat.

I stand in the empty lot with the photo burning a hole in my hand and I contemplate it one more time.

The same thing I've done every day since Duluth, and it comes out the same way it always does.

Marit up north in that house, sixteen and going flat behind her eyes, learning to be worth a lot to the family.