Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Dakvaar
It was my turn to cook dinner—and how much did I love that Sofia was enough a part of my life that we now instinctively took turns cooking?—but as I began to get out the ingredients for one of Rosa’s favorite noodle dishes, my Mate came into the kitchen and shooed me out.
“I can see—feel? Whatever—that you’re too focused on this Anthony thing. Go call your guys, make a plan. I’ll feel better once you’re all on the same page.”
I felt my lips curl at how well this female understood me now. “You really don’t mind?”
“Of course not.” She was already heating the pan. “We’ll all feel better when you have a plan hashed out. I don’t like him hanging over my head any more than you do.”
The problem was that it was difficult to make plans without any sense of certainty.
Kardok had started a group text about this very topic, and I’ll admit that I was grateful to be able to escape to my library—surrounded by my favorite books and sketches—and focus on how to protect my family.
“Most obvious first step,” Bardon had written, “is to bring your females to practice each day. We can protect them better from the ice complex, where we all are. I’ll make sure one of us is off the ice at all times, just in case.”
Kardok’s reply was immediate: “If that fucker shows up with Lila in the building, I’ll crush him before he even has a chance to get to Sofia. Even if I AM wearing skates.”
Surprisingly, it was Torrk—whose normal group text contributions were gifs of food fights—who asked the most important question. “What happens if he comes for Rosa when you’re at home?”
I should have known the younger man’s adoration of my Mate’s daughter would override his tendency for glib.
“I can protect them here,” I typed. “Everything’s locked up tight at night. I can bring them to the rink tomorrow, but we might need a duffel full of toys to keep my kitling occupied.”
My kitling. Because Rosa was mine now, as surely as Sofia was.
“Not a problem,” Kardok wrote. “I’ll ask Lila to bring her miniature unicorns, and she’ll prob be delighted to have someone to play with.”
I huffed a small laugh, knowing my teammate couldn’t hear or see me and thus ruin my stoic reputation.
Kardok was known as The Wicked for his reputation with the ladies, but when he’d met Lila, he’d fallen hard for a female who was classier—and wealthier—than he could have imagined.
He called her his princess, and both Kardok and her father competed to see who could spoil Lila more.
Jord, who despite being the rookie had lived in Bramblewood longer than any of us and knew the town the best, was the one who offered one last suggestion: “Holly’s brother is a cop. I’ll ask him to increase patrols past your place, just in case.”
It was a good suggestion, but Bardon beat me to it. “Good thinking, T’mak,” he typed. “They’ll be safe, Dakvaar. We swear it.”
Yes. They would. I would die to protect my Mate and kitling, and I knew my friends—my team, my clan—would protect them after that.
“Thank you, brothers,” I typed, then closed down my phone before Torrk could send a fart emoji, and went to cajole Rosa into helping set the table.
After dinner, she declared there was still plenty of time to practice ice skating. “Please, Dak? I wanna grow up and hit guys with hockey sticks, just like you.”
Across the table, Sofia dropped her forehead into her palm, and I could feel her exasperation and attempts not to laugh.
Luckily, I was good at keeping my humor hidden. “There’s a lot more to hockey than just hitting people, dkaar.”
“I know,” the five-year-old huffed. “I gotta get good at skating first! Now I got my helmet, I don’t gotta hold your hand all the time.” She paused, then shrugged. “Only when you think you’re might gonna fall, then I can hold it for you.”
“Thank you,” I deadpanned, and Sofia snorted without looking up.
“Pleeeeeease?” Rosa batted her eyes at me, because she knew I was a sucker. “I’ll get all bundled up, I swear, and Mama doesn’t let me skate without you. She can’t come because she goes ass over teakettle on the ice.”
One of my brows rose as Sofia gasped and jerked her chin up. “You’re not supposed to repeat that, young lady.”
Rosa shrugged unrepentantly. “I won’t have to if you learn how to skate, Mama.”
I decided it was time to intervene. “Little one, I will take you skating this evening, at least until it’s time to get ready for bed.
Your mother could use some time alone, I’m sure.
” I knew for a fact she hadn’t read more than four chapters in the last two days.
“But only because we’re inching toward the equinox, and that means the ice will begin to thin and we won’t be able to skate. ”
Luckily, this distracted her, and I was able to get through all the cleanup and dishes and bundling her into her winter gear and skates, just by explaining equinox and time zones and rotational spin to her.
I can’t imagine she understood any of it; my kitling just liked to hear herself chatter.
The pond glowed.
I’d strung the lights along the back porch a week ago—warm gold ones, because Rosa had informed me the white ones looked “like a dentist”—and they threw soft circles out across the ice, catching the snow that had begun to sift down sometime after dinner.
Fat, lazy flakes, the kind that fell straight down in windless air.
My breath plumed. The mountains stood black against a charcoal sky, and behind me, through the big window, my Mate sat curled on the couch with her tea and her book, one lamp burning beside her like a candle in a cave shrine.
I didn’t need the porch lights to see. Rosa did, and so the lights existed. Most things in my life now could be explained that simply.
“Dak! Watch!”
My kitling pushed off from the bank with tremendous ambition and little to no technique, arms windmilling, skates chattering against the ice, and made it nearly four full strides before physics caught up with her.
She went down on her backside with a whump that puffed snow off the surface.
I glided closer, unhurried. Rule One of Teaching Rosa To Skate: Do not swoop in to rescue her. Swooping earned me a lecture. An adorable lecture from a five-year-old, but still.
“I meant to do that,” she announced from the ice.
“Of course.”
“It’s called a sit spin. Miss Lila told me about them.”
As if Lila had had a chance to teach her skating? “Miss Lila’s are further off the ice,” I deadpanned.
“I’m gonna tell her you said that.” She rolled onto her hands and knees, stuck her rump in the air, and pushed herself upright the way I’d taught her, arms out, wobbling like a newborn bkarn.
Her helmet—teal, of course, with a cobra sticker Jord had provided without asking me—sat slightly crooked over her flushed face.
She beamed up at me, and my chest did that thing I was becoming used to; the squeeze of mine, mine, look at what’s mine.
“Better,” I told her. “You got up without grabbing me.”
“‘Cause I got my helmet.” She rapped a mittened fist on it. “No hands. That’s the rule. C’mon, do the train!”
The train: I skated slow backward loops around the safe rim of the pond while she chugged along in my wake, matching my strides, shouting chugga-chugga until she inevitably fell again.
We did the train. We did “red light, green light,” which she cheated at. We did the thing where she attempted to check me into an imaginary board and bounced off my thigh, sat down hard, and cackled at the sky.
Snow kept sifting down through the gold light. Her laughter rang off the trees, bright as struck glass, and I caught myself memorizing all of it—the crooked helmet, the mittens, the wet gleam of the ice, the warm window with my female behind it.
The vernal equinox was coming.
The ice would soften and the season would turn and it would be time for outdoor barbecues and playing in the sprinklers. But then…there would be a hundred more nights like this one, a thousand, a lifetime of them. My Kteer hummed, fat and content as a hearth cat.
Rosa attempted a turn, tipped, caught herself on one hand, and shot upright in triumph. “Did you see?”
“I saw.”
“I almost died, and I lived!”
A laugh cracked out of me before I knew it was coming, rough and loud in the quiet yard.
Rosa gasped like she’d witnessed a miracle. She pointed one mitten at me, delighted, merciless. “I made you laugh! I did that! Mama! Mama!” She swiveled toward the house, bellowing at the window. “I made Dak laugh! I did it!”
The wind shifted.
That’s all it was. A soft turn of air off the tree line, carrying woodsmoke and pine and snow and—
Gunpowder. Sweat. Expensive cologne over old cruelty.
Him.
My body moved before I’d even processed what I was smelling. I crossed the ice in two strides and had Rosa scooped against my chest, her skates swinging, my head up, nostrils flared, pulling the night apart scent by scent.
Woodsmoke. Pine. Snow. There—the tree line at the pond’s south edge, where the porch light died.
“Dak?” Rosa’s voice had gone very small. “Are we playing—”
“Hush, little one.” I turned, trying to put my body between her and the trees.
Anthony stepped out of the dark onto the edge of my pond, and he was smiling, and he had a gun.
The weeks had not been kind to him. The expensive coat hung wrong on his frame; gray stubbled his jaw below the sickly yellowish bruises he still carried from my fist; his eyes had a bright, wet shine that no sane man’s carried.
But his hand was steady, and the black eye of the pistol looked at me across thirty feet of ice, and every drop of blood in my body went cold and slow.
“There he is,” Anthony said, warm as a talk-show host. His shoes—city shoes, leather soles—slid as he stepped onto the ice, and he adjusted with a little chuckle, arms out, like this was all a marvelous game.
“The big television star. You know, I almost didn’t watch that night.
Hockey.” He spat the word. “Animals chasing a puck.”