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eight
Ice should be tired.Bree was, passed out next to him with a sheet draped at her hip, allowing him the pleasure of taking in the silhouette created along her bare upper body. The woman had too much crazy bottled inside that he wanted to let loose. What he couldn’t understand was why the idea of a quick fuck and retreat wasn’t plaguing him. Instead, all he wanted to do was watch as her body trembled beneath, beside, and on top of him. Lying on her side made the dips and valleys along her torso a road he wanted to travel, memorizing the curves until he could become one with the moves.
While the two of them had enjoyed another round minus the cubes, he had outstanding debts, which meant sleep would be elusive until they were settled. Bree may use computers and math with letters to solve problems; he kept his calculations in his head. Words on the page were a struggle for him, but he’d never had an issue with numbers and people. When he was younger, he’d memorize bets and run them around town for people. Who would suspect a kid on a dirt bike zipping along the sidewalks of bookmaking? For him it was a game he could master, and why knowing distances, highways, and the like were child’s play to him.
While he understood the Doctor was in play, he was merely a means to an end, one he’d seen for a flash, which was more than most still upright and walking. At this point Ice was on the list. The man was a sociopath, but one with a code, which meant there could be a parley put in place. For most, the Sinners weren’t the type you crossed without a death wish, but the Doctor played by a separate set of rules—one Ice needed to learn sooner rather than later.
After pulling the stark white sheet up and covering Bree’s shoulder, Ice rolled from the bed and went in search of his clothes. TV noise was bleeding through the adjoining door, and his kids understood a closed door wasn’t to be breached outside of fire, flood, or profuse bleeding. He needed to check on them. The tucked-in neighborhood they’d been living in was a far cry from how he’d been raised, but there was no deluding himself anymore that it wasn’t as fucked up. John was a politician, which made him more of a criminal than Ice could ever dream of being.
The Sinners may walk the line when it came to drugs, but they were simply cutting out the middleman and direct-to-consumer dealers. Sure, some drugs weren’t FDA approved, but that was just varying levels of good versus bad. The doctors were free to dole out thousands of pills a month following enough time between waiting periods and making proper diagnosis. So, they were good, they were healers where his version was seen as a crisis and wrong. Hell, the hospitals all carried cocaine, not a lot, but enough to stem certain injuries and ailments. Side effects were half the reason people loved drugs. Sure, Oxy took away your pain. It also made the world fuzzy and helped you sleep. For some of his clients they took shit to make it through the next family obligation.
Basically, the kids were fucked either way at this point. All Misty had done was buy land for a trailer and taken it off the base. He knew those people, putting on airs and putting flowering plants out front or upgrading to a double-wide. It was lipstick on a pig. The rotten souls were still inside fucking up the next generation. Ice had made his own moves, buying a place. It was for security, not being legit, for the lean years, not the current ones. When he glanced over at Bree lying tucked in on the bed, he wondered if he could live two lives, one of them where she made a home, a real one, for him. Only that would be unfair, pulling a straight-and-narrow woman in for a long-term thing. She was the marrying type, and he was the type married women came to when they were bored, pissed, or vengeful.
“Hey, monsters,” he said, stepping into the room to find his twins, as well as Bullet, eating French toast, bacon, and eggs from room service while they watched cartoons.
He’d gotten approval for a few Prospects to sit guard since Bree was right—his trailer, the clubhouse, and the Review weren’t exactly family friendly. Even Grimm understood five-year-olds shouldn’t be on Sinner grounds for an extended time. Plus, it lessened the chances of the Doctor showing up and wreaking havoc. This burden was on Ice, baggage his brothers would help carry, but ultimately it was his.
“It okay I ordered?” Bullet asked, the Prospect still finding his footing. “Got Raven some too.”
“Yeah,” Ice said, snagging a piece of bacon from Aiden’s plate and being met with pushback.
“Hey,” he whined, “I was going to eat that.”
Maybe Ice wasn’t a total fuckup. His first instinct wasn’t to backhand the kid for smarting off. Unlike in the house where he was raised, Ice snapped the piece in half and passed it back.
“You understand sharing, right?” Ice said, and Aiden rolled his eyes at Jane. “Alright, I’ve gotta go out. No one goes in Bree’s room until she’s awake. Are we clear?”
“What if she’s dead in there like Mama?” Jane asked, and Ice’s heart ceased.
The balance of relief his child actually acknowledged her mother was dead and not sleeping and the thought of Bree cut up with pieces strewn around the room like decorations turned his stomach. What did they call it, the thorns and roses? Thorns needed to be cut off when they couldn’t be avoided.
“Who’s coming to relieve you?” Ice asked.
“Not sure,” Bullet said around a mouthful of bread. “Heard Shadow maybe?”
Shit, Ice had wanted Shadow as backup, but there were other club Enforcers he could tap. Pulling up his phone, he called Daniel “Fubar” Coney. The man was good to have on your hip, and the moniker didn’t come from his face. If passage past a nurse was needed, the man could charm the panties off of a Mother Superior in any convent.
“Hey, I need you. Meet me at UMC,” he said. It was time to hit the University Medical Center’s ICU and see how out of it John really was.
“No ‘Morning, sunshine’?” the man grumbled. “You know, this might be why women don’t stay past one night with you.”
“Do they have a purpose after one night?” he questioned, only to glance to the closed door behind which a woman he didn’t want to leave lay naked.
“Touché, my brother,” he said. “Give me thirty.”
“You have twenty-three,” he said, the calculations on time, expected traffic, and distance comingled to lay out standards he expected everyone to accept.
“Twenty-four, my morning pisses tend to take a minute.”
Ice hung up the phone and leaned down to kiss both his babies on the top of their heads. “Alright, rock, paper, scissors to see who’s in charge until Bree wakes up.”
“Um, hello?” Bullet guffawed.
“The maturity level is equal across the board,” Ice said, and Bullet gave him a shrug of acceptance. The three took six rounds until Jane finally beat them.
Heading out, he was caught on the way to the garage by his concierge buddy.
“Ice, I’m gonna need more,” he said. “Conventions are rolling in, and taking two rooms ain’t gonna fly, even during the week.”
