by Chant, Zoe
“What the hell, Anders? And where’s Vance?” She leaned out the window, expecting to see the other twin hanging from another third-floor window.
“Up here!”
Vance was on the roof. Delphine’s heart jumped. “What are you doing?”
“Having a better plan than Anders.”
“A better plan for what?”
“Catching Santa.”
“...What?”
Hardwick leaned out the window next to her, stared down at Anders and up at Vance, and raised one eyebrow. “Your brothers do this sort of thing a lot?”
“Unfortunately.”
His eyelid flickered and she winced. It was a joke, not a lie, but she knew he was extra sensitive at the moment.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It means you do like them, after all. Teenage dumbassery and all.”
“Lucky them.”
His eyes sparkled. “They are.”
“Hey, you two wanna not take up the whole window? My fingers are gonna freeze off.”
Hardwick’s eyebrows pinched together as he stepped back. Delphine stuck to his side, slipping her hand into his. “So much for just us.”
Anders vaulted up onto the windowsill using only his fingertips. He grinned at Delphine and Hardwick and dropped inside.
Delphine made an annoyed-older-sister noise. “You’re not even wearing shoes?”
“Better toe-grip,” Anders explained. There was a buzz at the back of her mind, and he rolled her eyes. “Trust Vance to take the lazy route. First, he doesn’t even climb down the building, now he’s still not climbing the building and he’s just gonna walk down the stairs to get to your room?”
“Excuse me? How come my room is suddenly the place to hang out?”
“Oh, we, uh...” Anders trailed off.
Delphine crossed her arms and waited.
“Uhh...”
“Well?”
“Uhh...”
Someone knocked on the door.
“No guesses who that is.” Hardwick strode over and unlocked the door. “Vance, right?”
“Future brother-in-law, right?” Vance nodded at Delphine as he sauntered in. “Hey, sis.”
“Are either of you going to explain any of what you’re doing?” Delphine demanded, exasperated. “Santa? You two do remember you’re almost eighteen now, right?”
“You remember last year, right? The mystery of the Christmas cards?”
“It wasn’t a mystery—”
“We left Christmas cards in a box in the woods, and on Christmas morning, someone had slipped them under the window! Ooh, mystery!”
“Hardly.” Delphine explained to Hardwick: “One of the tourist businesses around here runs Christmas-themed sled dog trails where you can ride out to post a Christmas card in the woods. On Christmas Eve, the employees deliver the local cards around town. And the employees include an owl shifter and a pegasus, so I don’t think you two need to literally stake out the hotel windows to figure out how they manage that without leaving tire tracks.”
“Or it could be one of the dragons. Or the hellhounds! They work there too, don’t they? Anyway, uh, that’s not all we were doing.” Anders nudged Vance. She saw a hint of sparkly cardboard hidden in his hand.
“You’re stealing other people’s Christmas post?” she gasped.
“No! Only ours! Uh, yours.”
“Someone sent me a Christmas card?” She remembered doing this with the twins and her Mum the Christmas before. It had been a cute day out, with the twins pretending that racing dogsleds wasn’t anywhere near as fun as flying. Who would have sent her a card this year? She couldn’t imagine the twins going back—even if they had enjoyed themselves, it was more a thing for kids than for teenaged boys.
“Yeah, we sent it, sis.”
Delphine shook her head slowly. “And now you’re… stealing it back?”
Vance and Anders exchanged a nervous look. Anders pulled the card out of his sleeve where he’d hidden it. A cloud of glitter followed it. “We were going to leave it for you to read by yourself,” he said, “Or, uh, not by yourself, I guess, but…”
Vance took up his trailing sentence. “We had second thoughts about how you would take it and thought it might, you know, help, if we were both here to explain.”
Delphine’s head buzzed, and she could only imagine the furious telepathic discussion her brothers were having. She crossed, thought again, and held out one hand.
“Go on, then. I have to read it before you can explain it, don’t I?”
Reluctantly, Anders gave her the card.
More glitter fell off it as Delphine turned it over in her hands. It was exactly the sort of thing she remembered from last Christmas: a picture of Pine Valley, with a flying dogsled team howling ‘Merry Christmas!’ in glitter. She half-expected a tinny recording to start playing when she opened it.
Instead, her heart almost stopped.
It was Anders’ handwriting. He’d written ‘Happy Christmas sis!’ at the top and something else smaller down the bottom, but it was the text in all-caps in the middle that made the blood turn to ice in her veins.
Happy Christmas sis! the card read, and then: WE KNOW YOUR SECRET!
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hardwick
Delphine went white. She sat down with a thump on the bed and Hardwick was standing between her and her brothers before he knew he’d started moving.
He shot the boys a warning look and knelt in front of her. Her knuckles were bone-white, clutched around the Christmas card so hard she was bending it out of shape.
“No,” she whispered, her gaze so distant he knew she wasn’t talking to him. “No, this can’t be—”
Before Hardwick could say anything, the twins started talking over one another.
“I knew this was a bad idea!”
“You’re the one who wrote it so it sounds more like a blackmail note than a Christmas card!”
“I thought it would be funny!”
Delphine dropped the card, her fingers suddenly unclenching like a piece of machinery. Hardwick picked it up. His face went stormy as he read it.
“This is meant to not be a blackmail note?” He doesn’t bother to keep the growl from his voice.
“It says ‘love from’ us at the bottom!” Anders said plaintively. “And there’s a winky face!”
“We should have started with that!” Vance hissed. “Dear sis, we love you, happy Christmas, we know your secret and we still love you—”
“That sounds even worse! It sounds like we shouldn’t love her!”
“That’s what you said the other day! And we ended up writing that!”
This could go on for hours, Hardwick thought. And someone would hear the shouting.
He interrupted them. “How about one of you tells us exactly what this message is meant to say, then.” His griffin was angrier than he’d ever known it to be, and his voice had a sharp edge that was all claws.
Blessed Belgraves or not, the teenaged boys looked suitably awed. They exchanged another nervous look.
“You.” Hardwick pointed at Vance. “The one who wasn’t hanging off our windowsill. Talk.”
He sat down next to Delphine. His griffin ached to transform and shelter her under its wing, but he made do with wrapping an arm around her. She leaned into his embrace, her spine stiff.
Hardwick watched Vance scramble for words. The young man stared at his sister, regret all over his face as he took in her frozen expression and twisted-together fingers.
“We’re not stupid, you know,” he blurted out.
Next to him, his brother groaned and bit down on his own hand. “Seriously?”
“Shit! That’s not what I—I mean—after last year, when we surprised you here for Christmas and you didn’t even want to talk to us—”
“That’s not true!” Delphine’s head jerked back. She glanced at Hardwick and, when he didn’t react with pain, let her shoulders sag. Hardwick tightened his arm arou
nd her. Damn this family. They had her so messed up she couldn’t even trust herself to say that she wanted to spend time with her own brothers without worrying that was a lie?
Delphine swallowed. “Of course I wanted to talk to you.” About so many things, Hardwick guessed, even if she hadn’t let herself acknowledge it. “You’re my family. I—I thought I’d be spending Christmas with my boss, alone, and then you turned up, and I was so…”
She stopped.
Hardwick knew what she was going to say. It was obvious in the way her eyes had brightened as she got closer to the word, and how they’d shuttered over when she made herself hold her tongue.
Happy, he said to her silently. He didn’t send the word telepathically; he held it close to his heart, pressed it into the golden light that joined his soul to hers. You were so happy.
“You were so worried.” Vance sat down on the hotel room’s squishy armchair by the window, suddenly looking a lot younger. “We thought you’d be happy, but the whole time we were here it was like you were tiptoeing around us. Like Mum does when we’re at Grandma and Grandpa’s. And—and we thought about how we hardly see you anymore. It’s like you try to avoid hanging out whenever we’re all together. Not just the big family parties, but even if it’s just us.”
“It’s not like that.” Delphine’s face was tight with misery. “I love you guys. I really do. And Mum.”
“And we love you too! That’s why you should have told us you’re not a shifter!”
There must have been some color left in Delphine’s face after all because she went even paler. “I don’t—what are you—”
“We figured it out, okay?” Anders’ expression was sullen. Hardwick had enough experience with teens to know that it was because the kid was unhappy. “We should have figured it out earlier, but we didn’t. Neither of us has ever seen you shift. You’re way different when we talk over chat or video to when we talk in person. You’re all interested in what we’re doing, and stuff.”
“Oh…” Delphine looked as though her heart was breaking.
“So, that’s what the card’s about.” Anders was glaring at the carpet now. “We know you’re not a shifter, but that’s okay. Loads of people aren’t shifters. And we still love you, or whatever.”
Delphine’s breathing had gone very quiet. “Does Mum know?”
“We haven’t talked to her about it yet—”
“You can’t tell her. You can’t tell anyone.” Any hint of softness in Delphine’s body vanished. She was rigid as one of the frozen trees outside, all its sap turned to ice. “Promise me.”
“But—”
“Promise!”
It was as close to a growl as he had ever heard from her. He wondered if the boys heard the desperation in it—or only the anger.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Delphine
They promised not to tell. They didn’t look happy about it, and Delphine knew she was being unreasonable, but fear tore at her under her skin until she’d browbeaten both of them into not saying anything.
“I can’t go down to breakfast after that,” she admitted to Hardwick after the twins had left, both of them sending her sullen, unhappy looks over their shoulders.
“If you don’t want to go down, we’re not going down.” The protective growl in his voice made her heart quicken. “I’ll reach out to the twins, tell them to say sorry, we can’t make it. No one will think any less of you.”
“On Christmas?”
“Your family seems… traditional. Can’t see them complaining about your spending time with your new-found mate on Christmas morning.”
Heat rushed through her at the claim in his words. Your new-found mate. That was what this should be like. Simple and perfect. But—
“You cannot say that to my brothers,” she warned him. “I’ll never hear the end of it.”
She hesitated. There was a look on Hardwick’s face like he wasn’t saying something.
Her shoulders slumped. “Which would make a nice change from my relationship with them so far, which has been me not hearing… anything. I can’t believe they figured me out.”
“You okay?”
She shook her head slowly. “Yes? I am. I think. I feel awful that they thought I didn’t care about them. But them knowing? If only I wasn’t worried about them telling anyone, I would be… fine.” Her lips twitched. “Maybe even better than fine. Maybe even good. Though that might be going too far.”
Hardwick swept her hair behind one ear. “I don’t think it would be going too far,” he said gently. He pulled her into his arms, and his strength and careful, loving kisses did a better job of convincing her she might just be okay than her own heart did.
“Tell them,” she decided at last. “We’ll stay up here and get room service.”
Someone knocked on the door. The back of Delphine’s mind itched. She touched her head, frowning. “Do you hear that? Someone speaking telepathically?”
Hardwick shook his head and she sighed. That meant someone was speaking to her privately. But she couldn’t know who without looking on the other side of the door, and without knowing who it was, she didn’t know how to present herself when she opened the door…
The itch started up again. She motioned for Hardwick to stay where he was and cracked the door open, just a few inches. Enough so that she could glimpse who was behind it and arrange her face to be angry or bored or sleepily surprised, or—
“Mum?”
“Happy Christmas, sweetheart,” Sara Belgrave said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Are you almost ready to go down?”
Delphine wiped any trace of annoyance off her face and opened the door further. Her mother looked tired. She always looked tired when they were around the rest of the family—and she’d just had several days straight of them, in a town which the year before had been a relaxing sanctuary away.
“Ready? Hardly. We’ve just had the twins in here.”
Her mother winced. “Oh dear. I’m sorry about that.”
“They’re too old and ugly now for you to take responsibility for everything they do, Mum.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Belgrave.” Hardwick came over to shake her hand, but Delphine’s mother pulled him into a hug.
“Just ‘Sara,’ please.”
“About breakfast—”
In the time it took Hardwick to work his way up to find a way to explain their plans to her mother that didn’t suggest too strongly that they were going to stay in their room and bang, Delphine made a decision.
“We’ll be right down,” she said. “We just need to scrub up a bit first.”
Was it her imagination, or did her mother look relieved? “I’ll see you down there,” she said. “I look forward to getting to know you better now that you’re not under the weather, Hardwick.”
“Likewise,” Hardwick told her.
When her mother closed the door after herself, he turned to Delphine. “You changed your mind?”
“And I’m already wondering if it was the wrong decision.” She shook her arms out, trying to relieve some of the nervous tension in her shoulders. And her neck. And her spine. And—
Hardwick’s fingers pressed into her shoulders. He worked out the knots, his touch sure.
“I’m supposed to do this for you,” she complained half-heartedly. “For your head.”
“So, I don’t just get treated that way when you’re trying to find out my secrets?”
“Not only.” Which she still felt bad about, but his voice was a warm purr, so she added: “I’d say it worked quite well, didn’t it?”
He laughed into her hair. “Time for me to find out more of your secrets, then.”
From the way his fingers trailed down her back—just firm enough to keep up the idea that this was a massage, just soft enough to hint at something else—the secrets he was referring to were not of the deep, psychological kind. She took a step backwards. He followed, his thumbs slipping down to rub teasing circles around her tailbone; she step
ped again, he followed again, until they were in the bathroom.
And then it all went wrong. Hardwick was as enticing as he had been before, his dark eyes sensuous, his hands wickedly teasing—but Delphine was too distracted to let herself be distracted. She couldn’t drag her mind away from the breakfast table downstairs, the idea of her relatives all gathering together, what possible plan of attack she could formulate to keep them from hurting Hardwick with their thoughtless lies—and her brothers. She might not have spent as much time with them as she should have, or wanted to, but she knew them.
She knew that if she wasn’t there to steer the conversation and deal out a few well-timed kicks, she couldn’t trust them to keep their mouths shut. Not if they thought they were helping her. God, if they did that—
Clean, dampish, and thoroughly dissatisfied, she and Hardwick made their way downstairs at the same time as her cousins Brutus and Livia. Livia was complaining about having to wait until after breakfast to open presents. They both gave Hardwick a piercing look and asked him if he was feeling better. He was polite enough, but for the first time, Delphine wanted to put her hands in the center of Brutus’s stupid chest and shove him away.
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” he murmured as they hurried off.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice as low as his.
“Looks like it’s hunting season for poor, weak, headache-suffering griffins.” He kissed her. “I’m happy to take the heat if it means keeping it away from you.”
* * *
Christmas breakfast. In movies and books, it was the first moments of magic—families slowly waking up, kids squealing over stockings, early risers shaking and tapping wrapped gifts trying to figure out what was inside. Sometimes it was skipped over altogether in a festive whirl of fun and happiness.
Christmas breakfast in the heart of the Belgrave clan...
Delphine’s heart broke a little more as she realized how she had wasted her previous Christmas with her family. Last year, they’d had a quiet, relaxing breakfast, just the four of them. Anders had tried to make pancakes, and Vance had snuck out while the smoke alarm was blaring to buy pastries from a bakery that was open early morning for exactly that sort of Christmas emergency.
