Page 52 of The Devil's Ice

“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’swhat 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. “OfcourseI 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 acrucialone. 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 hadneverlaughed, 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 tobelievethat 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?”

Chapter Eighteen

Salt Lake City, Utah

Bones sat in the corner of the café, back to the wall, one eye on the window facing onto the bustling street. He hadn’t been home since Sheila’s warning the day before, hadn’t been on his motorcycle or in his truck –he’d been fattening up Uber’s bank balance, and paying cash at some crap motel downtown, just to be sure that he wouldn’t be in a situation where his ‘brakes failed’, or some ‘home invasion’ went way wrong.

He pulled out two phones now, one a burner just for making calls, one with WiFi capabilities, registered under one of his fake ID’s. Three years before, when Crusher had started to lose the fucking plot and tip over into mayhem just for its own sake, just to alleviate his boredom, Bones had purchased these two phones. He knew that there would be an occasion when he’d use them… he hadn’t seenthissituation coming, but then again, Bones had been in the life long enough to know that you never fucking know.

You just don’t know when fucking cancer will make you rethink every single one of your loyalties and life choices.

He searched online for Satan’s Bar in Denver, took a screenshot of the landline number. He stared at it for a while, simplyunable to believethat he was actually going to reach out to the Road Devils for help. He knew damn good and well that they’d tell him to fuck himself – if he didn’t have the ace in his pocket that he did.

---