Page 30 of Mischief

And I feel it leave my hands, all of it, everything.

Because the second another patch lays eyes on this, it stops being a family fight.

It's club business now.

And in this world, club business gets settled in one room, behind one door, that I have never once in my life been allowed to walk through.

"Kirkja, now," my father says.

He won't look at me.

His knuckles are split and running red, and he won't look at me.

"Now. Somebody get Runes back from the lake."

"Daddy."

"Get dressed, Tindra."

He still won't turn his head, and something in me caves in on itself at that.

This man, who's spent ten years unable to take his eyes off me, is suddenly unable to put them anywhere near me.

"You've done enough tonight."

* * *

They put Bodul in the chapel and they leave me in the hall.

Of course they do.

For fuck’s sake, I’m twenty-five and Bodul is twenty-eight. It’s not like I’m a seventeen year old girl.

Kirkjais for patches.

I'm blood, I'm the Prez's granddaughter.

And still, when the heavy door swings shut, it shuts with me on the wrong side of it.

The way it always has.

The way I've spent years beating my fists against.

They're in there deciding his fate right now.

And mine.

And I'm out here in yesterday's clothes with my arms wrapped around my own ribs, close enough to catch the low churn of men's voices through the wood and not one single word of what they're saying.

Runes comes tearing in off the highway within the hour.

He doesn't look at me either as he passes, this man who set me on my first bike, who calls me his little raven, who stood in the corner of my shop two weeks ago with something close to pride on his weathered face.

He walks past his own granddaughter like I'm a coat rack, and the chapel door swallows him too.

I slide down the wall until I hit the floor.

And I shake.