I hate this kind of thing. Always have. Forced smiles. Half-hearted gifts exchanged between people who would take a bullet for each other but can’t hold a conversation about anything that isn’t tactical or fatal.
Delilah, though… she’s fucking glowing.
Not in some overdone, spotlight-on-the-girl kind of way. She isn’t even trying. She never does. She just has this damn light in her eyes when she laughs with King and Larkin, wearing that deep wine-colored sweater that I know she picks because it isn’t technically red but close enough to count. The sleeves swallow her hands, and her cheeks are flushed from whatever cheap rum someone pours into the eggnog.
She looks young. Safe. Like all the shit she’s survived hasn’t hardened her bones or carved lines into her soul. Like she belongs in a world that still has room for glitter and sugar cookies.
I don’t. I never have.
Still, I walk toward her like I have any right to.
She’s cross-legged on the floor beside the little fake tree, head bent over a stack of wrapping paper she’s botching with dull scissors. Her brows pinch like she’s disarming a bomb, and there’s glitter in her damn hair.
“Is that supposed to be a gift or a crime scene?” I mutter, stopping beside her and dropping the small, square box I’m carrying into her lap.
She looks up, caught off guard, her eyes softening when they land on me. “Is that sarcasm in your holiday cheer, Captain Cash?”
I don’t smile, but my chest aches like I do. “Open it.”
Her fingers are cautious at first, then faster when she realizes I’m not going to scold her for tearing the paper. She pauses when she sees the box inside—matte black, plain. When she opens it, the look she gives me makes my throat tighten.
“You got me… an iPod?” she asks, blinking at it like it’s a relic. “What is this, 2010?”
I grunt. “It’s preloaded. Full of shit you like. Stuff I figured you wouldn’t let yourself listen to unless it didn’t come from your own library.”
She stares at it for a long time. Then, without looking up, she says quietly, “You’ve been paying attention.”
Of course I have.
She is silent for a beat too long, then gives a short, breathy laugh. “This is so stupid. But… I love it.”
Her voice cracks at the end. She tries to cover it with a grin, tugging one of her sweater sleeves over her hand and wiping under her eye with the back of it.
I crouch next to her, close enough that I can smell the hint of cinnamon on her breath. “You don’t have to love it.”
“I do,” she says, looking at me with that damn look. “I do, and I’m going to say thank you now before I chicken out.”
And then she does something she never does, not even when the missions are brutal or the grief is heavy—she leans forward and hugs me.
Not a one-armed, side pat bullshit hug. No. She presses her whole body against mine, cheek to my shoulder, arms lockedaround my back like she trusts me with everything that could ever matter.
I don’t move for a second. Can’t.
Then my hand comes up to the back of her head, fingers sliding into her hair, and I shut my eyes, just for a breath. Just long enough to let myself feel it.
Just long enough to wish the world outside doesn’t exist.
I slip the headphones on. Let the music play.
Too Sweet. Slow, aching. Hozier. Figures.
The opening notes slide into my ears, low and warm, and for a second, my lungs forget how to work. I sit there with the sound in my ears and the silence of her absence in my chest, scanning the reports she left behind. Each page is cluttered with notes in her handwriting—arrows, bullet points, circled locations—but it’s the backs of the pages that catch my attention.
Drawings. Quick, messy sketches. A skyline here. A bird. A cracked wall with a window barred shut. Random, at first. Doodles to keep her hands busy while her brain worked through intel. But the more I lay them side by side, the more I start to see the shape of something.
A path.
She didn’t know she was doing it. She was just offloading, processing in the only way her brain knew how. But the way these pieces fit together—overlapping visuals, reference points, movements between strongholds—it’s a pattern. A trail of crumbs she left behind without even realizing it. A map.
