Chapter Seventeen
It was late morning when Vixen woke up to a glorious smell and an even better sight: Ice Johansson walking into her bedroom, clad only in boxer shorts, carrying a tray with a pot of fragrant coffee and a buttery croissant. She blinked, astonished all over again at just how damn sexy the man was, and that he was here in her home. With her . Smashed up body and scarred face and all.
She’d never been one to believe in miracles – but now she’d experienced two . Breaking her neck and not being paralyzed, and Ice wandering into her bedroom bare-chested, bearing coffee. Vixen wasn’t sure which one felt more like divine intervention… then she saw those ice-cold eyes gazing at her with such warmth and respect, and she knew the answer to that.
Him. Definitely him .
“Well, hey there,” he said. “You sleep OK?”
She longed to do a full-body stretch, but knew that she was still too freaked out about her neck to do that. Instead, she pointed and flexed her toes, felt the pleasant tug work up her legs. Her ankle felt much better today, and so she decided to be totally grateful for that.
And for the half-naked hot guy in her bedroom.
“I slept like I got hit by a rock,” she said. “How long was I out?”
“A good sixteen hours.” Ice carefully set the tray on the mattress next to her. “You needed it.”
“Agreed.”
“OK, so.” Ice cocked his blond head at her. “I brought you coffee, ‘cause I’ve seen you drink it at Satan’s, but I have no clue what you take in it.”
“Black with sugar, please.”
“Got it.” He scooped some sugar onto a spoon, then added a bit more, handed her the cup. “And I ran out to the bakery a couple of hours ago and got a whole selection of pastries – croissants, cinnamon buns, some bun thing with chocolate inside, muffins…”
“Good God.” Vixen blew on the coffee, took a sip. “You trying to make me gain twenty pounds?”
“ More curves on that delectable little body?” Ice growled. “Fucking yes, please.”
Vixen blushed, looked at the tray. “So you decided to start by test running the croissant?”
“Yep. I think everyone likes them, don’t they?”
“I sure do. Thank you.”
“You got it, baby.”
Vixen paused with the croissant halfway to her mouth, feeling a wave of happiness move through her as he called her that name again. She’d never have thought – not in a hundred years – that Ice would be willing to soften and sweeten enough to call her anything but ‘Vix’. Hell, she’d been touched at just that much, so the fact that this hard man had a name for her, a special pet name, was indescribably moving.
“So.” She found her voice somehow, pushed down on her dizzying joy. “Any news? About anything?”
Those blue eyes were a bit distant suddenly, and she held her breath: she knew that MC business was secret to anyone and everyone outside of it, and she knew that she had to be OK with that, at least on some level. Having said that, she was sitting here with a pretty bad injury because of the club, and as a casualty of things that had zero to do with her, Vixen felt like maybe she had a right to some information. Not everything , of course, but maybe a hint. Even a hint of a hint.
“Yeah, I guess we need to talk about a couple of things,” Ice said. “I mean, you’re pretty involved, and Scars is so fucking grateful to you for Keira that he said it’s OK to fill you in a bit.”
“He did?”
“He did, and if he hadn’t, Zoe would kick his ass. She’s made it clear to her man that you get some information, as long as it’s safe for you.”
“I wouldn’t go against Zoe on much.”
“No kidding, huh?” Ice shook his head. “She’s a handful.”
“OK, so…” Vixen waved her hand in a circle, encouraging him to carry on. “I’ll eat and you talk. I mean, as much as you can.”
“OK, well, first things first. No word on Hannah and Joe. Not one.”
“No ransom demand? Nothing?”
“Nope.”
“But why haven’t you guys stormed into Utah and taken down The Hellions? I mean, unless Scars sent someone already, but I’d think that it’d be you . Am I right?”
“It would be me,” he admitted. “I’m the one who gets sent to take care of shit like that… me and the twins always took point on this kind of thing. It wasn’t supposed to happen so much after Wolf took the club legit, so I focused on bouncing and personal training, but… well. Things kind of keep happening, so I keep getting dragged back in. We all do.”
Vixen sighed, drank some more coffee. “I guessed that much.”
“It wasn’t hard for you to do,” Ice said. “Life around us has been a never-ending hotbed of activity these past few years.”
“Which is what Wolf was trying to get you guys away from. I hate that it hasn’t worked out that way.”
“Me too.” Ice topped up her coffee, sweetened it for her. “But to answer your question, no. Scars hasn’t sent anyone to Utah.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Because he’s working on the assumption that Viper Grant has the babies, and Scars is worried that he’s got them close, and if so, they’d be in the direct line of fire. If Viper saw any of us show up – even just to talk to him, no action at all, just come in peace – Scars thinks that he’s unstable enough to hurt those kids. He also thinks that’s why Viper took ‘em in the first place – to act as tiny human shields.”
“Oh, God.” Vixen was horrified. “I never thought about that .”
“It’s not a great thing to have to think about,” Ice said heavily. “But Scars is. The truth is that we’ve been blindsided by Viper – none of us ever gave him even a thought , not when we were dealing with Crusher Alcott. Next to him, everyone in that MC looked weak. But we got Viper way wrong, and now we’re playing catch up and the truth is that we’re way, way behind him. We know he’s willing to kidnap babies and run kids down in parking lots… so the idea that he’d sacrifice Hannah and Joe at the first sight of us isn’t too out there.”
“But Scars can’t just do nothing , right? I mean, if he doesn’t, Dux and Drake will take matters into their own hands one way or the other.”
“Not if it means their babies get hurt. They’re hanging tough for now, and staying with Briley who needs them there with her, but you’re right: their patience won’t last much longer.”
“So…”
“So we’re having a meeting today at the clubhouse,” Ice said reluctantly. “I can’t say too much about that, but I can tell you that we’re bringing in some outside help.”
“King?”
Ice stared at her, then realized that of course she’d know about Matt Kingston; the man had been in and out of the conference room at Satan’s a dozen times over the past few years, and Vix would have observed that with her own two eyes. And anyway, King’s reputation around Denver preceded him, and she probably knew all about him, separate from his MC connection.
“Yeah,” he said. “King.”
“Makes sense.” She took the last bite of pastry, sipped her coffee. “He’s known for taking care of things that nobody else can. I don’t have a clue about the man’s connections, but I do know that they reach all the way to law enforcement.”
Right away, Ice’s mind went to Travis Denton, and how he’d died so horribly, having his skin and guts and bones ripped out of him behind a speeding motorcycle, dragged on miles and miles of road. Then his next thought was Derrick Bale , naturally, the snake in the garden who’d definitely betrayed his friend.
King had done some looking into things with his King’s Men, and had reported to Scars that Bale was fully on the Hellions payroll. The man had a paid-for-cash holiday cabin in Vermont, an offshore account with almost two-hundred-thousand in it, and way more expensive toys than a Utah cop’s salary explained, even if he did head up a high-profile unit. The man was dirty, and he was dripping in the blood of innocents.
And soon he’d be literally dripping in blood; Ice was sure of it. He couldn’t say yet who was going to deliver the final blow to end Bale’s life, but right now, he suspected that it’d be the twins. He wouldn’t mind doing a bit of damage for what had happened to Vix, and he knew that Scars would want to beat the man within an inch of his life for Keira, and King would want to take some revenge for Denton, and the boys would be lining up if anything had happened to Wolf. But Ice firmly believed that Dux and Drake had earned the right to rid the world of Derrick Bale’s odious soul once and for all.
“Ice?”
He blinked a bit, realized that she had asked him something.
“Sorry, Vix. What did you say?”
“Is Wolf OK?”
“Honestly… we don’t know. We hope so.”
Vix gave him a searching look, those incredible eyes dark and troubled, but she didn’t ask anything more. Instead, she held out her hand to him.
Surprised, strangely touched, he took it, noticing yet again how tiny she was next to him. Most people were, of course, but Vix was small even for a woman. She was a fighter, though, in more ways than he’d ever have believed, and the fact that she was offering him comfort even as she was recovering from a living nightmare showed that toughness, through and through.
Sitting there on the bed that he’d shared with her the night before, his back warmed by a beam of December sunlight, the room smelling of coffee and Vix’s perfume, holding this sweet, strong woman’s hand, Ice felt something inside of him thaw, just open up a little bit. He wasn’t about to start gushing fucking poetry, but he’d already told her more about how he felt than he’d told anyone, ever.
What he’d told her standing in her bathroom had been totally alien to him, but somehow it had also felt exactly right, like he was coming home. And seeing as he hadn’t called anyplace ‘home’ since that trailer in Montana (and that was a pretty shit one, by any metric that he cared to bust out), he was starting to think that maybe a home wasn’t always a place.
Maybe it can be a person .
But can I be a home in return? Not fucking likely, not with the way things are .
“Ice?”
He started, realized that he’d missed yet another question. He was turning into a serious fucking space cadet, and he had to get his head in the game, and fast.
“Sorry, baby.” He squeezed her fingers. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “But I wanted to say something to you. I wanted to last night, actually, but I passed out before I got the chance.”
“OK. I’m listening now.”
“Well, it’s about what you said. About how you don’t know details about my life, but you know me .”
He nodded.
“And I wanted to tell you that I feel the same way, about you. I really don’t know the nitty-gritty of your life, but I think I see the big picture. Not the whole thing, of course, because I know that working as the MC Enforcer means that there’s a lot that’s impossible for me to know. Maybe even dangerous.”
“I’m sorry to say that’s true,” he said heavily. “The things I’ve done, Vix… the things I’ll still have to do until this is all over… I don’t want you to know. Even if Wolf and Scars said it was fine, or you’d be totally safe with the information, I still wouldn’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because –” Ice broke off speaking, decided to just tell this woman the truth. “Because then you’d look at me differently. Think about me differently.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I do. I’m not – in a lot of ways, I’m not a good person, Vix. It’s how I ended up as Enforcer, and it’s why I’m the one who gets sent when the shit is hitting the fan. I’m willing to do things that nice, normal people don’t and won’t.”
Vixen looked at him for a few seconds, and Ice was suddenly sure that he’d fucked this all up. But then she said in a quiet voice:
“Do you think that I don’t already know that about you? You think that your face – especially your eyes – didn’t give the game away, right from the jump?”
“Uh… well…”
“You might as well go around carrying a sign, or with a cartoon bubble over your head, saying: ’I’m a scary motherfucker and I’ll fuck you up and scatter your ashes where even God can’t find them’. I mean…you think you give off a cute and cuddly vibe?”
“Uh…” Ice repeated. “Well…”
“Well, nothing ,” Vixen said emphatically. “You’ve never pretended to be anything that you’re not, and I knew that the first time I saw you. Everyone knows it the first time that they see you.”
Ice sighed. “Yeah, OK.”
“Yeah. OK.” Vixen smiled at him to soften her words. “And when we were just about fun in the back rooms, that was all totally fine by me. You’d go off and do whatever Wolf told you to do, and you’d disappear sometimes for weeks at a time, and never say a word before leaving, and why would you? It’s not like I was your girlfriend or anything, right? And then you’d come walking into Satan’s like nothing had happened, like you’d never been gone, and you and me would just pick things up where we left off. And that was all cool with me, it was all I wanted from you. Then.”
Ice lifted his head to meet her steady gaze. “And now?”
“Well, now things are different, aren’t they? You’re here in my home, in my bed, taking care of me. We’re talking, like, with our clothes on – most of the time, anyway, as last night in the bathroom shows – and sex is way the hell off the table for a good long while. So all we had in common for ages was a physical thing, that was all that we were about. But now it’s the exact opposite.”
“That’s all bang on the money.”
“So now I want to tell you some truth.” Vixen set her cup down on the tray. “You did that for me last night, and again just now, so I figure now it’s my turn.”
“Go on, baby.”
“OK.” She took a deep breath. “So the truth is that after what you said to me that day, after Wolf told you no to going with him to Utah, I was hurt. Like, really really hurt… and that surprised me. It surprised me that you could hurt me. That was my first sign that I cared what you thought about me, and how you spoke to me, and I realized that if I cared, then you were more than just a – ummm – a –”
“A back room boy toy?” Ice supplied helpfully.
“Yes!” Vixen laughed. “God, that’s it exactly .”
“Can I say again that I’m sorry for what I said to you?”
“You can, but you don’t have to.” She brushed his lips with her fingertips. “It’s forgiven.”
“Thank you.”
“Anyway, then we didn’t talk for two weeks, and you just stomped around being a glowering asshole to everyone , so that’s when I knew that it wasn’t about me. It wasn’t personal.”
“Facts, Vix.”
“So I thought to myself, ‘I’m totally free to do whatever I want’. I mean, I technically always was , because we weren’t official, but we weren’t with anyone else when we were together. But during that two weeks of you being such a prick, it occurred to me that I was free to go into the back room with anybody.”
Ice went very still; he was suddenly totally sure that Vix had been with someone else while he’d been a miserable piece of shit to her. He didn’t blame her, and he had no right to be upset, but he did feel a stab of hurt.
Your fault, man. You called her a whore, then you didn’t talk to her, didn’t apologize. She was a free agent and her own woman .
“Oh,” she said, seeing his face. “Oh, no. No , babe. I wasn’t with anyone. I haven’t been with anyone since you. I swear.”
“Babe?” he said quietly.
“Oh.” she repeated, as she clocked what she’d just said. “Is that – is that OK?”
“Hell, yeah, baby.” He brought her hand to his lips, planted the softest kiss on her palm. “It sure is.”
“So this one day, the day of Scars’ and Zoe’s wedding, actually, when you guys were all up at ranch and I was working, this guy came into Satan’s… and he was my type, you know? Like my type in every way, and he asked Julianne for me to serve his table. I started to walk on over to him – and you know how I do that when I’m flirting.”
“I sure do, Vix,” Ice said fervently, remembering countless times when she’d sauntered over to him, her heart-attack-inducing thighs all taut and exposed, her perfect breasts peeking out of her unbuttoned shirt, her sky-high fuck-me-now boots bringing the top of her head to just below his chin. The woman moved like dirty poetry, like a knowing angel, and the thought that other guys had been on the receiving end of that little miracle pissed him off – but again, she did it to get tips to survive, and she’d never taken it any farther. Not even when he’d given her every excuse to throw herself at another guy. “There’s a reason that you make more tips than any woman I’ve ever known.”
“The thing was, I couldn’t do it.”
“Couldn’t flirt?”
“No.” She smiled. “I couldn’t even get to his table to start the flirting.”
“Say what?”
“Yeah. I aborted the mission after three paces. Turned right around, dumped the tray on the bar in front of Mel and went for a break.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Vixen said succinctly. “I felt like I was cheating on you. I felt committed to you, like we were involved, and not just for steamy, mind-blowing sex in the back rooms, either. I cared about you, and I liked you, and I wanted to be with you and just you, and even though we weren’t speaking at the time and you were being a grade-A asshole, just the thought of kissing another man felt like I was being unfaithful, and I couldn’t do it. So I didn’t.”
“I’m really happy to hear all of that.” He paused. “Even the grade-A asshole part, ‘cause that’s totally fair.”
“Which brings me to what we were talking about last night, about how we know each other at our cores, even while we’re missing a metric fuck-ton of pretty basic details.”
“So what do you know about me, Vix?”
Ice held his breath as he studied her face; waited for her answer as his eyes ran over the scars again, musing how they made exactly zero difference to him in terms of her beauty. Vix remained the most staggeringly stunning creature that he’d ever seen, with the hottest little body that he wanted to get on his knees and worship.
More than any of that , though, was the fact that the woman was turning out to be someone that he really enjoyed being around fully clothed. Ice was surprised to realize that if for the rest of their lives, he and Vix just sat here on this bed, drinking coffee and eating their body weight in pastries and chatting, he’d be happy.
“I know that you’re loyal to the club,” she said quietly. “They’re your family, and I know that they’re the only one that you have. I get the feeling that they’re the only one you’ve ever really had. So you’ll hurt and maim and kill for your President and your brothers – and I don’t think you lose any sleep over it at all. If you’ve done something for the MC, to protect it and its members, then your conscience is clear. Doesn't matter how many bodies you’ve left in your wake – the club is your family, and family is worth killing for. Dying for.”
He gave a nod.
“I don’t need to know names of who you’ve killed. No details about anything you’ve done to hurt people. Not because if I knew them I’d be in danger, or because I’d look at you different… but because I know that when Dawson Kinney walked off with half the club and all the contracts, just abandoned Wolf so early in his Presidency, you stayed. I know that Dawson would have asked you to go with him, and he’d have thrown money at you. Maybe more money than you’ll ever see in your life.”
“You’re not wrong, Vix.”
“Didn’t think I was.” She gazed at him. “You stayed with Wolf and the club. You’re not someone whose loyalty can be bought and sold, not at any price. So I know that about you, Ice: I know that when you consider someone family or important to you, you’ll die before you betray them or let them down. And I think that now I’m someone who you’ll die to protect. Me, Zoe, Keira, Hannah and Joe.”
“Goddamn right.”
“So I won’t know everything that you do; I won’t know most of it, actually. And I’m fine with that, Ice, because I don’t want you to talk about it once it’s over. I see no need to go over bad things, and I’d hope that if you were to tell me something, it’s because me not knowing puts me in danger. Beyond that, it’s between you and you.”
“Understood.”
“But –” Vixen took a deep breath, readying herself for the hard part of this conversation. “I know that something does eat away at you, and whatever it is, that’s the reason why you’re so in control when you drink. If I had to guess – and this is only a guess – I’d say it’s because of your father. I think he did something to you and your Mom when he was drinking, and it was so bad, you never got over it. More than that, I figure you were a heavy drinker for a long, long time to cope with whatever he did… until one day you looked in the mirror and saw that you were becoming him . That’s when you stopped. Put down the bottle and even though you might have half-a-beer every six months, you never picked up the hard stuff again.”
Ice stared at her, utterly dumbfounded that she’d gotten it so right, despite him not breathing a word.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said hastily. “Really, babe. I’m not hinting around for the story. I just – it’s something that I know about you, something central to who you are. Like your loyalty, and your integrity at not being bought, I know that you have things that you wish were different, and seeing as how hard you fight for this family, I think it’s because you lost your first one in some way that was so traumatic, you dove into a bottle.”
“Shit,” he muttered, feeling a bit shaken. “Are you a witch?”
She gave a small laugh. “I’ve been called that, and worse.”
“I’ll tell you, Vix,” he said slowly. “ Just you, and just this once. Then we never talk about it again.”
“You don’t have to –”
“I want to.”
The tone of finality in his voice was so total, that Vixen shut right up. She knew that Ice was doing this for himself as much as for her, and she braced herself for the story. Whatever it was, it had frozen Ice’s core to ice, frozen it solid. He might be able to be gentle with her, take care of her, but there was a part of him that was always going to be hard, cold, menacing, dark. She didn’t think that he’d ever let it loose on her… but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t there.
It didn’t take long for him to tell her about that Christmas Day. He spoke as if he was reading a police report: brief, to the point, emotionless. Just the facts, ma’am, and keep how you feel out of it, if you don’t mind, but the rote recitation didn’t diminish the horror even one little bit. No matter how matter-of-fact Ice kept it, the fact was that a six-year-old boy saw his mother dead and faceless at his drunk father’s feet, saw his father point a gun at him, saw his father blow his brains out. Then that little boy sat in that trailer with two dead bodies for almost five days, playing with a Matchbox car, before his father’s loser buddy came over to go for a drink.
What that five days must have been like, Vixen couldn’t imagine, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to ask. Instead, she said:
“Where did you go after? Family?”
“No. Into the system. Foster care.”
“Oh, no,” she breathed, dismayed. She’d never heard one single good story from any survivor of foster care, and she didn’t think that Ice would be the first. “It was bad?”
“Bad enough that I ran away when I was twelve. Took my chances on the streets.”
“Oh, no,” she repeated. “What did you do to survive?”
He shrugged. “Ran drugs, then sold ‘em. Robbed empty houses when people were on vacation. I was so cold and business-like about everything and everyone, I got the name ‘Ice’ then, and it’s stuck ever since. Nobody in my life right now knows my birth name, and I’ll never tell.” He stopped, and stared at her hard. “But you need to know something: I never mugged anyone in the street, beat anyone up for money, killed anyone for their wallet or TV. I know I hurt people with the drugs, but I didn’t care about that, seeing as they wanted them so bad and they were chasing me, waving money at me. I broke into houses and took whatever I could carry and fence, but nobody was ever there when I did that. I don’t have much of a moral compass, Vix, and what I have doesn’t point north most of the time, but even at my most desperate and hungry, I never took down an innocent.”
“OK.”
“The first time I killed someone, it was when I was in Iraq. It wasn’t even technically murder, because I was wearing a uniform with the American flag on my chest, and I was trained and under orders. That was my first time taking a life, and here’s the truth, baby: I was totally fine with it.”
“You were?”
“I was. I found out in that moment that as long as I believe in the kill, I can live with it. More than that, I was good at it. So many guys in my unit had crises of conscience after killing a man, they twisted and turned and went to the chaplain and the therapist. But not me. I was at peace with it, because I believed that it was me or them, kill or be killed. I didn’t love doing it, you understand, and I didn’t go looking for it, never got a taste for it, but I perfected it.” He took a breath. “I was so efficient that I got tapped for some special training, and ended up a SEAL in Afghanistan for six years. That was when the killing got hard, though. Messy.”
“Why?”
“Because by then, I couldn’t tell anymore who the enemy actually was. It was a clusterfuck over there, with us killing kids, and kids killing us, and us paying off bombers and terrorists for safe passage to get someplace to take down a village because maybe some guy was there who we wanted dead, but I thought that we also wanted all the fucking bombers and terrorists dead, but instead we were working with them. Giving them hard US currency so they could go out and finance a new attack on American soil. You get me? It wasn’t black and white anymore. Wasn’t clear.”
“Yeah.”
“So then I started having nightmares,” Ice said slowly. “About – about Christmas. About the last time that I was so completely helpless and out of control in a situation. Hell, even living on the street as a kid, I felt more on top of shit than as a fully-trained-up grown man in Afghanistan, having to shoot kids in the face, and watch known terrorists walk off with bags of cash.”
“I can only imagine.”
“ That was when the drinking got bad,” he said. “I mean, I took my first drink when I was ten and I liked it just fine, and I drank too much and way too often well into my twenties – but it was when I finally came back state-side that it spun out of control completely. When I joined The Road Devils.”
“Why then?”
“Because under Wheels Jordan, the Prez before Wolf, a bit before your time, I started being glorified for the killing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Wheels started celebrating me for it. He’d send me out on a job, I’d hurt or kill someone, and come back to a huge party at Satan’s, with women and music and drugs and booze. It was a good time at the parties, lots of laughs and bragging. I never touched the drugs – but I sure as fuck overdid the women and the alcohol. Did that for years and years.”
“So…” She briefly touched his hand. “Why did you actually stop drinking like that?”
“You were right, what you said.” He sighed. “About looking in the mirror and seeing my old man staring back at me. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened – it was just another fucking Wednesday in my life – but something about my face, the way I was standing there. My eyes. Something scared the living shit out of me that day, and all I saw was him . Then all I saw was her . And that was when I realized that I was him – I was a drunk piece of shit who went around killing people and laughing about it after. I suddenly understood that I’d gone from hurting people to protect myself and others, or to obey orders, or to save my family, to hurting them for a story to tell over whisky and tequila shots.”
“But you kept doing what Wheels wanted?”
“I did. But I never went to another party, and if I absolutely had to go, I’d stick to Coke, maybe two sips of beer. Pretty much stopped hanging out with the guys socially at all, actually. Did what I was told, then either hit the gym or just went home. After a while, the boys came to see me as a damn good Enforcer, a fucking superb club protector – but nobody to have a drink with, or spend time with. And that was all fine by me. It was better than what I’d had before.”
“I can see that. But… didn’t you ever get lonely?”
“Well,” he said slowly. “Not lonely, exactly. I think I’m pretty fine on my own, and have been for a long, long time. But, I got… bored, I guess might be the best word for it. That’s what the women were for, really. I treated the woman like – like distractions. Time fillers. I ’ m sorry to say that to you, because that’s how I thought about you when things started up between us. You were – well. You were a great way to pass the time before I could go home and go to sleep.”
“No, it’s OK, Ice. I get it.”
“And that’s not how I think about you now,” he added. “I hope you know that.”
“I do.” She smiled at him. “Of course I do. If you still felt that way about me, you’d throw me off on someone else to take care of me.” She paused and looked at him seriously. “One more question?”
“Go.”
“If Scars sent you to Utah or anywhere else, for whatever reason, to do whatever, would you tell me now?”
“Would you want me to?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes.” He gently brushed her hair off her forehead. “I’d tell you that I was going, and what I was going to do, what I was tasked with by Scars.”
“OK.”
“Why would you want to know?”
“To mentally prepare myself for you to maybe not come back,” she said simply. “A heads-up, I guess. Just in case.”
“I think that’s a fair request. I know that Zee and Scars have that arrangement. Probably Jo and Silver, and Elle and Viking, too. You ladies deserve to know when your men are walking into the line of fire. More than usual, I mean.”
“OK.” She gave him a tremulous smile.
“Any other questions, Vix? Anything that you really need to know?”
“Just one more question. And it’s a crucial one. Life and death, actually.”
“What’s that?”
Vixen smiled at him differently now; she gave him one of her perfect, radiant ones. One of the ones that made the cold and hatred in Ice retreat, even just a little bit. “Did you burn those goddamn slippers?”
He stared at her, speechless, then he laughed like he had never laughed, not in the whole of his life: from deep in his chest, from way down in his stomach, from his guts. And when he did, he felt something deep and dark, something that had been with him for so long that he’d never even noticed it, like an internal shadow that he mindlessly carried around, start to dissipate.
He also understood that this was Vix’s way of saying, ‘ I promised that we’d never talk about any of this ever again, and we won’t. Now, back to the ugly fucking slippers ’.
“I didn’t,” he finally managed. “You wanna go do that after the club meeting? I know a place in the mountains with a fire pit. I bet you’d appreciate some fresh air after all that time stuck in the hospital, huh?”
“Road trip!” Vixen said merrily. “We can even bring marshmallows.”
“Marshmallows and red wine, baby.” Ice shook his head at her, a grin still on his face, absolutely unable to believe that this woman had just accepted his messed-up life with such generosity and understanding. “Now – you want a fresh coffee and a cinnamon bun before I head out to the club meeting?”