Page 33 of Mischief

My grandfather's jaw works side to side.

My father's throat moves like he's trying to swallow something with teeth in it.

And still not one of them tells me I'm wrong.

Because I'm not, and the cruelest part of being right is standing here watching it change absolutely nothing.

Bodul stares at the floor.

He hasn't lifted his eyes to me once since the ruling.

And that, more than the fists, more than the door, more than thekirkjaI wasn't allowed inside, is what tells me how bad this truly is.

Because the man who once held my face and told me to keep my eyes open so he could watch me fall apart won't lift his head to look at me now.

They take him one way.

My mother takes me the other.

And as they walk him off down the hall, one arm locked around his broken ribs, his eyes down like a man who's already surrendered to something he can't name out loud.

Two things hit at once, right there in the wreckage of the worst night of my life.

I've lost him.

Exactly the way they want me to.

And whatever's behind his door, whatever he was one breath away from finally handing me before the world caved in, it's still out there.

Still coming for us.

They've torn down the one person who was standing between it and me, and they think they've done me a kindness.

CHAPTER SIX

Bodul

The room they let me use has never felt smaller than it does the morning after they beat me in it.

Somebody wrapped my ribs while I was half out of it inkirkja, taped them tight, and I don't know who and I won't ask, because asking means talking, and talking means somebody has to look at me, and nobody in this clubhouse wants to look at me right now.

I lie on the narrow bed and stare at the water stain on the ceiling and hurt in places I'm running out of names for.

The eye's swelling shut again, the one that finally healed.

The lip's split back open.

My nose crusted with blood I didn't bother washing off because washing means the mirror and the mirror means seeing what her father did to me.

None of it compares to the deeper ache, the one that sits under my sternum like a swallowed stone and has her name.

Tindra.

Twenty feet of hallway and one club ruling away, and she might as well be on the moon.

I close my good eye and I let myself have it for exactly one minute, the memory of her, the weight of her on my chest, her mouth at my ear telling me we were fine.

Wewerefine.