9. Jamie
CHAPTER NINE
jamie
Hayat sat with 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 her other 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 going to 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?”
Poppy lifted a shoulder. “The seller had no idea she was holding on to something special. But I agree. Three hundred dollars wasn’t nearly enough for something this precious. I made sure she was compensated.”
Heart pounding, I took the box from his hands, suddenly nervous. I was more anxious over her reaction to the shoes than I’d been about her saying yes to changing her last name.
Grabbing my shoulder, Poppy gave it a firm squeeze. “Hard part’s over, kids. You three got that girl to fall in love with you. All you have to do now is keep her heart safe. And these shoes? That’s something you realized on your own that she needed. Even if you did need a little help getting hold of them.” He tipped his chin down, meeting my gaze head on and causing me to choke back the emotions trying to rip free of my throat. “It’s okay to ask for help, Jamie. That’s what family does.”
Swallowing with difficulty, I nodded, blinking against the burn of tears. Sparks and Ky bumped my arms in encouragement, but they were having trouble holding on to control of their own emotions. “We got this.”
“Damn right, you do.” Poppy gave my shoulder another squeeze.
Sucking in a steadying breath, I turned. My eyes went straight to Hayat. Amala had gotten tired of singing, and now she had a book in her hand that Hayat was reading to her. A few of the other kids had moved in closer, listening to the story.
Thankful for the distraction, I sat beside her, keeping the box out of sight for a moment. Sparks and Ky dropped down on the other side of her, their attention glued to her face as she used different tones of voice for each character in the Christmas-themed book Amala favored.
“Who wants dessert?” one of the moms called from the kitchen.
“Me!” Amala and Hayat cheered at the same time.
Amala jumped to her feet. “Hurry, bestie! I want cake.”
“I’m trying, Mini. But my legs are too long. Run and tell Glamma to save me a slice.” Dark red pigtails were the last thing I saw before Hayat slowly unfolded her legs, trying to stretch out the soreness in them.
“Crap,” she groaned as soon as Amala was out of sight. “I need two Tylenol and a massage. Everything hurts.”
I grasped one socked foot, pressing into her arch. Moaning, she dropped her head to Ky’s shoulder. “That’s better than any cake. Don’t stop, Jamie.”
I massaged her calf, her heel, and then her toes, a happy hum from her my reward. Keeping her distracted with one hand, I quickly extracted a shoe from the box and slipped it onto her foot.
Her head popped up from Ky’s shoulder. “What are you—” She broke off, a strangled sound leaving her mouth. It had taken me a while to see the difference between the shoes she’d worn earlier in the day and the ones from the box, but obviously, Hayat had noticed immediately.
I finished tying her shoe then grabbed her other foot. Keeping my eyes on what I was doing, I could feel her gaze on me. Her silence seemed to grow louder and louder until I had the second bow perfect. Only then did I chance looking at her.
Tears glittered in her eyes, her chin trembling. Fuck, had I gotten it wrong? “Where did you get these?” she whispered.
“Had some help.”
Her lashes lowered, and I pushed down my nervousness. More tears spilled over her cheeks too fast for me to wipe them away. “Jamie.”
“I’m sorry your other pair was ruined. That you lost so many memories. I—we—can’t fix them, but I want… We want…” Fuck. Struggling to find the right word, I stroked my hand up her leg and then covered her flat stomach. “The five of us can make a lifetime of memories, Hellion.”
With a cry, she scrambled to move so she was in my lap, dropping kisses all over my face. “This is a hundred times better than any ring. You know that, right? I’m sorry I messed up your proposal. But I swear, if you guys had planned this all along, I would have said yes even faster than I did in the hospital.”
I shuddered. “Let’s forget about that, okay? We can tell the baby this is how their daddies asked Mommy to be their forever.”
“Agreed,” Ky grumbled, coming up behind her while Sparks took my left. “That proposal totally didn’t count.”
She lifted her head. “Technically, this isn’t a proposal either. No one asked me anything. So…”
Sparks tipped her chin up, his face damp with tears, his mouth set in a serious line. “Hey, Hellion, do you want to be our forever?”
“So much, yes.”