Page 40 of The Devil's Ice

“Hannah and Joe have been taken.”

Vixen was so stunned that she actually stopped breathing. She swore that her heart literally stopped beating from the shock, and her brain screeched to an absolute halt in its functioning. How long she sat there in suspended and frozen animation, she had no idea, but however she looked, it was bad enough that Ice sat down next to her on the sofa and took her hands.

“Breathe, Vix,” he said quietly. “I got you.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, her eyes prickling with tears. “Taken? Are they hurt? Are they –”

“We don’t know.” Ice smoothed a tendril of hair off her pale cheek. “But if the fuckers who took them wanted to send a real message, they’d have – they’d have left the babies in the cribs. Left the bodies.”

“Bodies…”

“Hey,” Ice said gently. “We need to believe that Hannah and Joe are OK. Weneedto, Vix. All of us.”

“But… but Briley. And the twins. They must be frantic.”

“The doctors have her sedated, most of the time, because when she’s awake she’s inconsolable and raging. The boys had to tackle her just yesterday because she tried to run out of the house into the snow in her bare feet, screaming about her babies being missing.”

“Oh, myGod,” Vixen said again, trying to imagine the calm and collected Briley Cross, ex-cop and smart-as-hell woman, being that out of control. “And Dux and Drake?”

Ice raised one shoulder in a shrug. “They’ve been in bad situations before, with people that they care about. They can – compartmentalize, sort of. They’re putting how they feel in deep freeze for now, but when it’s over, they’re going to fucking kill whoever did this.”

“And you’re not going to stop them.”

“No.” Ice’s tone was final. “None of us will.”

She was silent, thinking things through, wondering why having knowledge of a pre-planned and -meditated murder barely fazed her. “So… so this attack on me and Keira –”

“We don’t know exactly what the intention was,” Ice said. “It might have been to kidnap Keira too, even if it meant killing you in the process.”

“But maybe they wanted us both dead,” Vixen said hollowly. “You’ve seen the video of the way that van came at us, Ice… it looked like he was trying to run us over. I mean, if they’d wanted Keira to stash wherever with the babies, why wouldn’t they just hide out behind the van? Knock me out or kill me as we passed, and just grab Keira then?”

Ice sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think they were trying to finish you both.”

“So why wouldn’t they kill the twins too?” Vixen asked. “Why Keira, but not Hannah and Joe?”

“Vix, I don’t have any definite answers, and I’m sorry. All I can say is that there’s a clearly well-planned and coordinated movement against The Road Devils, and the people that we care about. They went after you and Keira, and at the same time, they took the babies right out of their beds in Pennsylvania while Briley was asleep down the hall. And Wolf –”

He broke off now, and Vixen stared at him.

“Wolfwhat?” she said, already terrified of the answer. “Is he –”

“He’s in trouble,” Ice said reluctantly. “That’s all I can tell you about that, and I hope you can understand.”

“But he’s not dead?”

“Until we have bodies laying cold at our feet,” Ice told her. “We assume thateveryoneis alive. That’s how we’vealwaysdone it, Vix, so that’s what we’re doing now.”

“OK,” she whispered. “OK, I can try to do that too.”

“Good girl,” he said, and Vixen felt another shock jolt through her body, as strong and bright as lightning, but it was a good jolt this time. He’d never,evertold her anything like that before, and she found that she really liked it. “Now. Can I stay here with you? In light of everything I just told you, and the fact that you saved Keira’s life, and you being just a little bit injured, Scars wants someone watching your back and helping you out until you’re healthy again. Is it OK if it’s me?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “I wouldn’t want it to be anyonebutyou.”

They sat and looked at each other, just held eyes, held breaths, held hands. Something was sparking between them now, moving back and forth between them, and suddenly, they both knew that it was time to have a conversation.

Theconversation.

And yeah, the timing sucked, and honestly, it was pretty much impossible for it to be any worse. Babies were missing, a mother was being drugged to keep her from rampaging around the earth looking for them. A small girl had almost been killed in a parking lot, and God only knows what that meant for how safe she felt moving through the world. An MC President was in trouble, all alone and unprotected, and his brothers one state over didn’t even know if he was alive or dead.

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