Zeb…

I asked Nox to phone ahead to the club. We rode back to it in the back seat of the black Escalade the club kept for things like this. Archer drove, Rush sat shotgun, and Nox sat behind me and and Tiff in the third row of seats. Tiffany had retreated inside her own head and stared out the window on her side of the cage. I wanted to hold it together and wanted to hold her at the same time, but I knew the two were at odds with each other.

She’d shot Silas at a pretty close range and was probably covered in all sorts of forensic evidence. We needed to deal with it, and quickly, which is why I’d had Nox call ahead.

“Pull around back, eh?” I said to Archer when we got close to the club and he grunted. A wordless acknowledgment of what I’d said. That was just Archer, though. He was always a bit of a grump.

I dismissed it, rather than being a bit of a dag for once. I was more concerned with getting home and hosed with Tiff. The mission was only half done. No one ever stops to think about the cleanup efforts or the after-effects of your first time killing someone. I wouldn’t be surprised at Tiff going bush for a while over this. I had my first time, but in the end, I was too much of an extrovert to stay away from people for too long. Tiff wasn’t the same as me, though. I was afraid if she went bush, she wouldn’t come back from it. I couldn’t tell which way she’d go, though.

“Everybody out,” Archer declared when we pulled up on the track. Off to one side, Blue, Thirteen, and Data stood warming their hands over a fire in the pit.

“Come on,” I urged Tiffany out of the back seat and toward the flames.

“I don’t really feel like being social,” she said gently and Archer huffed a laugh.

“Ain’t about being social, it’s about covering your damn tracks. Do what he says.” I frowned at him and made a motion behind Tiff like he should pump the brakes. He scowled back and walked away muttering some shit about amateur hour under his breath.

Nox and Rush looked on in our direction with twin looks of worry plastered on their twin, but very different, faces.

“She’ll be right,” I told ‘em and Nox nodded, giving his twin’s jacket sleeve a tug. They followed their older brother in the back of the club.

“There they are,” Thirteen declared when we came ‘round the cage, then cheerfully said to Tiffany, “Best get to doing what you do, girl.”

“What?” she asked, and her face smoothed out into confusion that almost looked like surprise.

I worried about her. I think she was going into a bit of shock over what she’d done, but she was in good company. Wasn’t a soul among my bros that would judge her poorly for killing that wally.

“Strip,” Data explained to her. “All of it, in a pile, right there,” he said and pointed to the snow beside her.

“What? Out here?”

“Don’t need you tracking DNA up inside the club, Sweetheart. Git her done and Zeb’ll get you into a hot shower in no time.”

“Just trying to keep us all safe,” Blue said gently and captured Tiff’s eyes with his own. He had a way about him, calm-like, that tended to rub off on everyone else. Especially when the shit was flying.

Tiffany nodded and stripped bare, shivering in the frigid snowfall.

“Come on, quick,” I said and she trotted across the snow making a beeline for the outbuilding.

She said through chattering teeth, “I hope there will never be one, but next time, remind me to murder someone in the summer.”

I barked a laugh at her black humor and felt my shoulders loosen up with relief. If she were coping with dark humor, then she had the constitution for this. She would make it.

I turned on the hot in the washroom and told her, “I’ll be back. Going to grab you a flannel and a couple towels.”

She practically dove under the spray letting out a little “Ah, ah, ha!” at going from such an extreme cold to warm.

“You good?” I asked, making sure, and she nodded, letting the water soak her hair.

I made quick work of striding up the hall and keying my way back into my room. I went for the supplies in the top of my closet and took it as a sign that there were just enough of my towels left that I could shower with her. I stripped down fast and pulled on a pair of shorts to make my way back to her but when I entered the washroom, it wasn’t how I’d left her.

She’d waited until I was gone but she’d finally cracked and now she sat on the shower floor, hugging her knees and sobbing. I set the things on the bench, locked the washroom’s door, and got in there with her, going to the shower floor and pulling her into my lap. Holding her while she wept and just letting her go, letting her cry. She earned a good cry, I reckon.

* * *

Sometime later, we were laying in my bed, nude and wrapped in each other, but I hadn’t tried to give my ferret a run. She didn’t need that. She just needed contact and hadn’t seemed to mind we were skin on skin. We’d lain there silent for the longest time and was almost dozed off when her voice startled me awake.

“Were you really shot?” she asked and I jolted. She raised her head from my chest and turned to look at me, her eyes wide.

“I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be, eh. It’s all good.”

She studied my face for a long time and I felt my heart sink as she tried to sort through her tangled emotions. Seeing that asshole again had scrambled her but good. I patiently waited her out, waited for her to decide I really meant what I said and that it was okay to relax again. She settled, laying her head back down, fingertips playing along a scar on my stomach from a knifing when I was a teen.

“Got knifed there,” I said and she stilled her fingers.

“Where were you shot?” she asked.

“My leg.”

“Oh.”

More silence, and I wished I could see her face and what she was thinking.

“And the scar on your back?”

“Glamorous tale that one,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“Fell out of a tree when I was nine.”

She laughed slightly and sighed. “The one on my ribs is where Silas kicked me with his damn cowboy boot. You know, the kind with the metal tip on the toe. Everyone thinks it’s a surgical scar because of the dots on either side from the stitches, but nope.”

“What excuse did you give them that time?” I asked.

“Kicked by a horse, fell into a barbed wire fence. They weren’t buying it, but I wasn’t about to tell them otherwise.”

“Mm,” I murmured and traced fingertips over her skin, idle patterns from my dusty memory back when I wanted to make my dad proud before cancer took him and I got angry at the world.

“I can’t stop wondering how this changes things,” she murmured.

“It doesn’t. Not really. You’re changed, and you know you've changed but it’s not like you did anything in cold blood, eh. You did the world a favor.”

“I don’t think killing anyone is doing the world a favor,” she said.

“This time,” I said, tracing along the line of a scar on her side, “it was.”

“I feel like I’m this awful person now,” she confessed, and I laughed a bit at the notion.

“The fact you feel that way mean’s you’re not, eh. An awful person wouldn’t care if they were awful.”

She pushed herself up and looked at me, “That is both incredibly smart and incredibly profound,” she said.

I smiled one-sided, “I have been known to be both on occasion, I reckon.”

She looked wounded, “I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Hush now, Wahine. I know you didn’t.” I pressed her back down over my heart where I carried her always, now.

She sighed out and asked, “You’re sure this doesn’t make me a monster?”

“Nah, Wahine. You’re a monster-slayer if anything. You brought your friend justice, today.”

She sniffed and I felt bad for bringing Lia up. She shuddered against me and I put my arms around her to hold her through this fresh storm of tears and man, I wished I could take her pain away.