Page 36 of Sinful Mafia Santa

Our blades are covered with plastic guards to make walking easier and to protect the sharp metal. I find my balance immediately—this is easier than riding a bike, more basic than sex.

Aeryn, though, wobbles. “The boots are so rigid!” she says.

“You’ll get used to it. Don’t forget—you don’t have a toe pick.”

She looks down at her feet like she’s having second thoughts. But she lets me take her hand. She allows me to walk her through the locker room and down the tunnel to the ice illuminated by exit signs and security lights.

Gripping the boards, she lets me pull away her plastic guards, left foot first, then right. I drop mine beside hers, and we both step onto the rink.

She wavers again, flailing her arms for balance. I catch her around the waist before she gets close to falling. “Easy, babygirl,” I say, breathing in the scent of my shampoo on her hair.

Her laugh is shaky, so I lace my fingers between hers. We push off together, matching stroke for stroke as we make our way down the long side of the rink.

My muscles still know how to glide. But the air feels colder than I remember, pressing in from the shadows. The sound of the slicing blades is sharper, the hiss louder than I expect.

We take a full lap around the rink, holding hands. Then Aeryn slips her fingers from mine. She lengthens her stride, picking up her pace. She rides out each stroke to its limit, gliding into a wide, sweeping turn.

She knows better than to try jumping—she’d need a toe pick for that. She doesn’t even try a spin. Instead, she pushes for pure, unbridled speed.

I stay close enough to hear her laughter, but I let her take the lead. When she begins her turn at the end, I cut across the rink, gliding backward as she hurtles toward me. We make another loop like that—giving and taking, matching each other, dancing on the ice.

She’s breathing hard now. Her strokes are coming slower. She catches herself at the end of the rink, pushing up against the goal. It shudders as it takes her weight, but she doesn’t have enough momentum to knock it off its posts. I come to a stop beside her, sending up a spray of ice.

Her hands are tight on the goal. She’s looking down at theblue-tinted ice beneath her feet, at the semi-circle that marks the crease.

“This is where it happened.”

She doesn’t phrase it as a question, but I answer anyway. “Yes.”

“In less than five minutes.”

“Yes.”

“He must have been so afraid.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve thought about it hundreds of times. But I’m not holding back from Aeryn anymore. “He would have gone into shock almost immediately. But he could see the trainers he trusted. They’d patched him up dozens of times before. He would have trusted them to do it again.”

“I wish I’d been here.”

Even if she’d come to the game, she would have been on the other side of the glass. She couldn’t have reached him in time. I say, “That wasmyjob.Iwas supposed to be here, holding his hand, telling him he’d make it through, promising to tell his family he loved them.”

“He knew all that.”

“Did he?”

“He was a Reardon. He knew his clan.” Her voice is suddenly thicker with Irish than I’ve ever heard it before. “He knew his friends too. He forgave ya before he died.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. Because I’m a Reardon, too.”

She’s a girl. And the youngest. And Logan didn’t seem inclined to accept that she wanted to be a sub—much less with his best friend as her Dom. But she needs to believe her story. She needs to think it’s true. So I say, “He forgave both of us.”

She offers me a smile—simple and pure. Her eyes are huge in the dim light. Her hair gleams red.

Graceful as some sort of sea creature, she sinks to her knees. She touches her fingertips to her lips, then brushes them acrossthe blue ice. I don’t know if she says a prayer when she bows her head or if she’s only whispering a final farewell.

I hook a hand around her biceps when she starts to rise to her feet. She overbalances a little, leaning into my chest. Folding my arm around her waist, I skate us over to the bench and match the plastic guards to her blades. She lets me help her down the tunnel to the ransacked equipment room.