Page 16 of One Hellion of a Christmas

CHAPTER NINE

jamie

Hayat satwith her legs folded under her beside the fire. Amala was singing her a Christmas carol that Hellion was nodding her head to keep the beat of. Around them, Christmas wrapping littered the floor, while other kids squealed and raced around.

Even with her face all beat up, Hellion was the most beautiful thing I’d ever set eyes on. She was like a beacon in the darkness that called to me. I’d become a better man because of her.

For her.

I couldn’t let myself think about the bruises on her face and wrists. The men who had tried to take her from us might be dead, but the fear of nearly losing her was still too much for me to contemplate.

Gritting my teeth, I focused on the good things. She was safe. Sancho, Miguel, and the men who had harmed her were pig slop now.

Sparks nudged my shoulder, and I forced my gaze from where Hayat was clapping her hands in time to the new song Amala was singing. It was hard to focus on anything else but those deep dimples and that sweet laugh as her happiness filled the room until it touched everyone.

Turning, I angled my body so Ky and Poppy could hide the box of the last-minute present we’d had to hustle to get. Samara had mentioned Hayat’s reaction to her shoes getting destroyed with gore, and it hadn’t sat right. She hadn’t said a word about it to me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those damn shoes.

While Sparks and Ky had worked, with Vaughn’s help, to track down Miguel, I’d taken Poppy aside and asked him about them. He’d been just as confused as I was when I’d first asked him why she would be heartbroken over a pair of shoes. But then his eyes had shifted from one brown to another, and he’d groaned.

“Fuck. Those were her favorite pair, weren’t they?”

I’d shrugged, still confused. “I mean, they aren’t any different from most of her shoes, but I guess she did wear those the most often.”

Scrubbing a hand over his tired face, he’d grunted. He’d handled Hayat being taken better than expected. He should have punched each of us in the face for letting any Guerrero close enough to breathe the same air as her, let alone touch her. But Poppy only gave us each a bear hug when he’d realized she was okay. Harris and Jace, however, kept shooting us killer glares. I figured if they got any of us alone, we were going to get an ass-beating, but it was deserved.

“You might not have been able to see the difference in those shoes, compared to most of the others in her closet, but trust me, there was something special about them.” A muscle had ticked in his jaw as his eyes swirled from one shade of brown to another. “I can’t tell you what is going through her head about those shoes, because not even I know for sure. But I do know one fact. They were the only thing I’ve seen her wear consistently that had any kind of direct connection to Devlin.”

“Fuck,” I’d groaned, my chest burning with the sudden loss that she must have felt. She didn’t let anyone talk about herother grandfather. Neither Dev nor Nat. Definitely no mention of Maddie was allowed. But I knew my soft-hearted hellion was still secretly holding on to her love for all three of them.

And now, that one connection she had allowed herself to keep was covered in blood and gelatinous brain matter.

Trinity, Jarrett, Avalyn, and Banks were still a big part of Hayat’s world. Ky was front and center in his niece’s life, and we saw Avalyn often throughout the year. It got a little tense when Dev, Nat, and Maddie were at the same events for the kid. Hayat put up an impenetrable wall when she knew she would be in the same room as those three assholes.

It never failed to piss me off that they didn’t even blink in her direction. That Dev and Nat were still on their fucking high horses because they couldn’t get on board with her relationship with all three of us. Many in Hayat’s family had been sure they would eventually come around, wake up, and realize all that mattered was that Hayat was happy.

That hadn’t happened, and those who had imagined it would had learned that the hard way. Dev hadn’t fought for Hayat. He hadn’t even fought for Harris or Evan. He’d simply given up. But Nat was the worst of the two. Her relationship with Trinity had suffered, and then there was the whole losing her share of the company she’d spent most of her life helping build.

Instead of looking in the mirror for the reasons why Nat now had a wall between herself and the majority of the rest of her family, she blamed others. Emmie and Annabelle for pushing her out of the business. Harris and Lucy for not standing with her and Dev against our relationship with Hayat. But more than anyone, she blamed Hayat.

As much as I disliked Nat, however, that was nothing on how I felt about Maddie. If she were on fire, I’d pour a gallon of gasoline on her to help the bitch burn faster. But I wasn’t goingto spend any extra time thinking about her and her vendetta against my hellion.

“There’s no salvaging those shoes. They need to be burned, because I sure as hell can’t let them touch her skin ever again,” I told Poppy. It was still surreal to me that I was blessed enough to have Hayat. But I was, and she had brought with her the first real sense of extended family I’d ever experienced. Ky and Sparks were my brothers, but Jesse Thornton had come to mean so fucking much to me. Getting to call him Poppy like everyone else in his family was a gift I would never take for granted.

“No, I understand. I had Lyric destroy everything she was wearing. There’s probably no way that what happened would blow back on her, but I couldn’t take the chance.” Rubbing a hand over his bald head, he’d pressed his lips into a hard line. “Let me see what I can do. Maybe there’s something…”

“Anything, Poppy. Cost means nothing. But I have to do something. Her heart hurts right now, and it’s fucking killing me.”

He patted me on the back. “Same, kid. Same. Gotta make a few calls. I’ll let you know as soon as I know something.”

That had been the last thing we’d said about the subject, because Vaughn had found Miguel after using some new software he’d been working on to enhance facial recognition on low-quality CCTV.

I looked down at the shoebox Poppy held in his hands, my brows pinched together as I took in the details. It was the exact same pair of shoes Hayat had been wearing when she’d been taken. And while I didn’t understand the difference in those shoes compared to every other pair of white athletic shoes she owned, I did know that these replicas meant something special to our hellion.

“How did you get those?” Ky whispered.

“Oddly enough, it was as simple as looking on eBay. The seller lived in Georgia and was asking three hundred dollars for them. They’ve supposedly only been worn once and had been sitting at the back of the woman’s closet for years. I didn’t want to chance them getting lost in the mail, so I had a friend pick them up and deliver them personally.” He tipped his head to the side. Looking over to see what—or, rather, who—he was talking about, I spotted Zander and Annabelle talking animatedly with Drake, Nik, and Axton.

Sparks tapped his fingers on top of the shoebox. “Seriously, only three hundred for them?”

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