Page 28 of Mischief

"We're fine. For once, we're actually fine. Let me just have this."

And I let it go.

Because I love him, and because we're safe, and because I believe him.

I believe we're fine.

That's the last thing I believe before the door flies open.

There's no knock.

No key scraping the lock to warn us, no boots in the hall, no mercy of a half-second to move.

One breath, we're wrapped up in each other in the dark.

The next, the door swings wide and the hall light crashes across the bed, across both of us, across everything, and myfather is standing in the doorway.

Nobody moves.

It's theworstsecond of my life, that frozen second, all three of us caught in the light like animals on a road.

I watch it wreck him.

I watch my father's face go from tired, to confused, to something that has no name as he takes in the bed, the bareshoulders, and his daughter tangled up with a half-dressed prospect in the one room he'd never think to look.

I see the exact instant the bottom drops out of his world, because it's the same instant it drops out of mine.

"Daddy, I?—"

I'm already lunging for the sheet, dragging it up over both of us, my pulse slamming so hard I taste it at the back of my teeth.

"Daddy, wait?—"

He doesn't wait.

He crosses the room in two strides and rips Bodul out of the bed by one arm.

And Bodul goes.

He doesn't fight it, doesn't set his feet, lets my father haul two hundred pounds of him down onto the floor like he's nothing, and I'm screaming.

I don't even know what I’m saying, clawing up onto my knees with the sheet clutched to my chest as the first punch flies.

The sound of it is the part that guts me.

Not a movie sound.

A wet, heavy, sickening crack of my father's fist against a face that's barely finished healing.

Bodul's head snaps sideways.

Blood comes, dark and fast, and he doesn't lift a hand.

He doesn't lift a single hand to stop it, only folds down over his broken ribs and takes it, and my stomach drops away entirely as I understand what I'm watching.

He's going to let my father beat him to death before he'll raise a fist against the man who made me.

"Stop!"