Page 23 of The Hard Way (The Kinky Bank Robbers #5)

Chapter Eighteen

We stayed joined for a long time, up there on that ski jump platform.

Lost together, alone together.

I brushed his hair aside. “I’m trying to remember the last time we had sex, just us.”

“Mmm.” Maybe he couldn’t remember, either.

“I’m going to…”

“Slow, baby.”

I pulled off of him as slowly as I could.

Even so he groaned, like it was painful for us to unjoin.

I smiled and collapsed next to him. He pulled a pair of handkerchiefs from his pocket and handed one to me.

“Aren’t we Johnny-on-the-spot.”

“Always.”

I cleaned up and rolled the handkerchiefs up and stuck them in a pouch in my bag, then I pulled my clothes back on. “Does my nose look okay? Is it on straight?”

“Miraculously,” he said, pulling his pants on.

I just straddled him again.

“What are you up to? ”

“I missed you.”

He settled his arms around me. “Well, this certainly improves the view.”

“Are you being funny?”

“You’re the only view I need.”

“Butter me up all you want, you still don’t get to torture and kill Hank.”

He smiled, but it wasn’t the good kind of smile. This smile contained way more hate than happiness.

“I mean it,” I said. “Like what Zeus said—we won’t let you lose your humanity over this. There’s always another way.”

“There isn’t always another way,” he said. “Sometimes all you have is losing your humanity. Sometimes all you have is going dark. You don’t know. And I never want you to.”

“I won’t let you lose yourself.”

“I lost myself a long time ago, goddess. The idea that I’m like a regular person or like you or even like Thor and Zeus, that’s a fiction.”

“Stop it.”

He brushed my hair back. “It’s true. You didn’t know me before.”

“I know you now.”

“You don’t, baby, not really. I’ve done very dark things. Things that don’t get washed out with time.”

I ached with such grief for him. “You’re beautiful and good, Odin. You see yourself wrong. You’re not objective.”

“It means everything that you think that,” he said sadly. “It means everything.”

“Fuck that. Like I just think it. Like it’s this fiction.”

“If you knew the things I’ve done. If you knew what I did to get my men out of that prison in Algiers.”

“Whatever you did, you had to.”

He gazed out over the valley, arms tight around me. We just sat there, gazing out .

I laid my forehead on his shoulder. “Tell me, then. I want to know.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Tell me.” I met his gaze. “Make me understand. Here and now.”

He shook his head. No .

“Why?”

“It’ll change things.”

“Not for me.”

Again he shook his head.

I traced the shell of his ear. “Trust me with it. That’s what a marriage is for—right?” Silence. “Do you ever dream of being free of the darkness of it?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me. Do you?”

“I suppose.”

I swiped my thumb across his beautiful cheekbone. “Remember our wedding vows?”

His gaze clouded. Oh, he knew where I was going with this.

“ I promise to always love you. And to protect you. And to fight for your dreams. Do you remember? That’s why you’re going to tell me. Because we’re allies.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said.

He gave me his stormy look, like this wasn’t the time for levity, but actually it was. What better time?

“It wasn’t planned, what I did,” he said suddenly. “During the escape, I mean. It’s just that we’d gotten really far. It had taken months of planning and loosening the joints of our cage. We had a helper on the outside, a ride. We had drugged the guards. It was our one and only chance.”

I stayed extra still as he spoke, outlining the plan.

Explaining the unthinkable conditions, the way Mahfoud the Sadist was breaking the men that Odin had fought alongside.

The way he’d been going further and further.

The political conditions had evolved to where they could never be let free; Odin felt sure the clock was ticking.

That Mahfoud was breaking them for sport.

The punishments were getting more random.

One of his men had killed himself by drinking drain cleaner, unable to bear going back in the hole.

“We were out of our cells, and we came upon a gate. This gate, it was new. Not in the blueprints we’d acquired.

Not in the circuitry diagram. A new gate.

Computerized. There was a code to it, and one guard had it.

This man, he was one of the better guards, a family man, a man we didn’t want to hurt. But he wouldn’t tell us the code.”

He was silent a while, studying the view, all lime green and candy blue. He explained about the viciousness of the war. I didn’t know what war it was. Odin was from Morocco, but he had family in Algiers. I didn’t interrupt to ask. And really, war is war.

“This man, he knew he’d die if he told it.

I had to make him tell. You can’t believe the ways I made him hurt.

A few of my men wanted me to stop, but we were dead if I stopped.

There was no good option. The things I did to this man to get us that code…

it cut deep. It cut in a way you cannot understand. ”

I brushed my fingers over the furrow in his brow.

“Even my men tried to stop me. But we had to go forward.”

“And you took the darkness into yourself. All into yourself.”

“Don’t make it sound heroic. It was at that moment I understood that I could leave myself. People who have near-death experiences often talk of leaving themselves, and glimpsing the beautiful place beyond. The light. The sense of oneness. Of connection.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“I left myself, too, but it was not beautiful. I pressed the blade into him, slowly, painfully, over and over. I know how to make a man hurt without killing him, Ice. I would die to keep you from knowing this kind of pain I inflicted on this man. With every cut, I cut myself off from my heart and life and little bit more as I looked into his brown eyes. One little broken vein toward the inside part. Wrinkles here.” He touched his face.

Like the face of the dying man was inside his.

“I met his gaze, I knew that he saw me leave. It was a terrible kind of intimacy, because he knew—he knew it all. Nobody will know me as he did just then. I became something other.”

I took his hand. “You’re not cut off from your heart now.”

He said nothing. Did he not believe it? I looked down at our hands. His large hand, olive-skinned, lighter on the knuckles and the scars. My hand, small and pale.

“I joined up with ZOX after that. They had many uses for a man like me.”

“You’re not that man anymore. That man in that escape.”

“I’m very much still that man.”

I guess he believed it. That he was still there.

“You know what the one thing you didn’t tell me about that prison just now?

You didn’t tell me what your men would’ve suffered if you’d turned back.

If you hadn’t forced yourself to get the code from the guard.

You sit there telling me this tale, making no excuses.

You’re taking in the darkness for yourself even now. That’s a kind of love.”

“There’s no love in what I’m telling you.”

“Your men tried to stop you. But they would’ve been killed if they’d stayed. Being so far along in the escape. Right?”

He just shrugged.

“I think you wanted them to try and stop you,” I said.

I don’t know how I knew that, I just did. It bubbled up from his story. Or maybe from our connection.

“I think that going dark like that was a gift that you gave to your men,” I continued. “I think you didn’t want to save just their bodies. I think you wanted to save their souls, too. You had to let them oppose you, even to hate you. It’s the only way they could be free.”

He shook his head.

I continued, stubbornly, “You wanted them to try and stop you. That’s how you saved their souls. So that they could live with clear hearts after the escape.”

He stared down at our gripped hands. His fingers flexed, and I wondered whether it was emotion flowing through. He wasn’t showing me his eyes, so it was hard to tell.

“You took the fall,” I added.

He said nothing for a long time. Then, “You make it sound noble. It wasn’t noble.

And I’ve felt cold ever since. Cut off ever since.

Except once in a while, with the four of us.

When the four of us are together, I feel warm again.

Connected again.” He looked up, and his expression was wild.

“These past two years of us four together have been like a miracle. It’s been enough. It’s more than I imagined I’d have.”

“What are you saying?”

He brushed my hair back from my face. “I’ll bathe in his blood for you, that’s what. You’d never forgive yourself if your sister went to jail.”

“We still have options.”

“The more time we wait, the more dangerous things become.”

“I don’t care. I think you want to hurt Hank. I think you feel like it will end Mahfoud when you hurt Hank, and that it will end your seeing that guard’s eyes when you close your own, but it won’t.”

“Are you playing psychologist now?”

“Yes, and I won’t let you give up on the high road, Odin.”

“Sometimes you need one person strong enough to absorb the darkness. Of all of us, I’m that.”

I looked at him, horrified. In a strange way, he was right—at least in that he could do it, that he knew how.

Odin was offering a gift—his own soul for my sister.

But we’d lose him—I knew that as sure as I knew the sun would rise.

We’d lose him just as he’d lose himself.

“Fuck that, we’re in a marriage now. You don’t get to leave or go dark. Period.”

“You’ll survive. ”

“Are you out of your mind? No.”

“You think you have a choice?”

“Odin. No!”

He turned away. The wind whistled through the tree branches. “A man like that, so careful. If there’s evidence, we won’t find it without his help. I know it. They both know it. They just won’t tell you it.”

I squeezed his hand—hard. “Promise me, you won’t go after him directly.”

“I won’t make that promise.”

I felt nervous and so scared. “Promise for twenty-four hours. Something might come out of the break-in.”

He stiffened.

What? Would he not even promise twenty-four hours? “Somebody’s here,” he whispered.

“Are you trying to get out of promising?”

He shook his head.

I stiffened. Shit . Had somebody followed us here? We were pretty much sitting ducks up on that platform.

Odin pulled out his Sig.

“Promise me. A full twenty-four hours.”

He gave me a look.

“Do it.”

“Fine. I promise.” He stretched out on his belly, looking down through a gap in the boards.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing. Yet.” He directed me to stretch out on the edge of the platform, the part covered with the most wood, just in case shooting started, but of course he didn’t say that.

“You think somebody’s going to just light this thing up?”

“If it’s Denko? Yes.”

“You think it’s Denko? I thought we ruled him out.”

“We never rule out Denko, goddess. And I’ve felt somebody out there, watching. It could’ve been Hank all this time. He has to know there are insurance investigators in town. I’d watch us if I were him…”

“But it could be Denko.”

“Always.”

“And he’d shoot this thing down,” I said.

Nothing.

“I don’t feel anybody out there.”

He lay there silently.

“You promised.”