Page 31 of Mischief

Not the delicate way. Not one brave tear tracking down one cheek.

My whole body goes, my teeth knocking together like the hall's gone subzero when it hasn't, my hands trembling so hard I have to trap them under my thighs to keep them still.

The tears come the ugly way, silent and endless, running off my jaw and soaking cold into the collar of my shirt while I strain at the door for any sound of what they're doing to the man I love.

Mom finds me there.

She came back with Runes, and she doesn't waste a word on it.

She only folds herself down onto the filthy hallway floor in her good clothes and gathers me into her chest and holds me while I come apart in her arms.

And I let her.

Because she's my mother, and I have never needed her more than I do on this floor.

"You knew," I say into her shoulder, my voice in pieces. "You always knew. About him."

Her arms cinch tighter around me. "I knew."

"Then why didn't you say anything?"

She goes still for a moment, her hand smoothing down my hair the way she used to when I was small enough to fit in her lap.

"Because you looked happy," she says finally. "For the first time in ages, you looked so genuinely happy. And I wasn't going to be the one to take that from you."

Her voice thickens and drops.

"I hoped I'd have longer before the rest of them found out. I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry it went like this."

And I cry harder into her, ugly and wracking, my whole chest hitching with it.

Because a room away, they're carving up my happiness without me, and my own mother couldn't stop them.

There is nothing, nothing on this earth I'm allowed to do but sit on a floor and wait.

The door opens after what feels like a year.

Men file out, and I'm on my feet before I know I've stood, hunting their faces for anything and finding only that shut, blank, club-business nothing they all pull down like a shade.

Then Bodul comes out between two of them, and my knees nearly buckle.

His face is ruined all over again.

The eye that finally healed is swelling shut before my eyes.

His lip is split fresh, blood drying dark down into the stubble on his chin, and he's cradling his ribs the exact same way he cradled them the night he rode home from wherever he'd been.

His one good eye finds me across the hall.

And it's full of something I can't read, something that looks too much like goodbye.

"Bodul—"

I start toward him.

"Don't." My father's voice, low, right behind me. "Tindra. Don't."

I round on him.