Page 59 of Remade

I grunted and braced myself for war. But it was official. I was gonna ask the nerds at work to create an online persona for me so I could do online shopping without compromising my own identity with targeted ads, data mining, and AI. Most operators did that in some capacity.

I’d never had to worry about this with Kat around. She’d bought everything. Except for my annual gag gift exchange with Coach. This year, I was getting him an Italian dictionary.

He’d bought a run-down villa in northern Italy years ago, and the place still didn’t have electricity or running water. I wasn’t sure it had windows. So every time Coach bitched about needing a vacation, we, his best friends, got on his case about fixing up his pile of Italian rubble.

He was currently deployed, so maybe when he came home, he could take that vacation.

I wouldn’t mind a vacation either, to be honest. Training our recruits with Danny filling in for Coach was an experience.

Leighton and I buckled up and faced the holiday shoppers with a single goal. To get the fuck out of here as soon as possible. We started with Alex. Leighton was giving her a kit to make homemade slime, which was near the top of her wish list. As the overcompensating uncle, I’d already bought her an ATV for kids, but I needed some smaller shit for the plastic tree in our room. Coloring books and glitter markers and whatnot.

The big problem was the Quinns. We were flying out on the twenty-third, and Leighton refused to arrive empty-handed. Hewanted something for each family member, and that wasn’t easy when you barely knew them.

Myproblem was what the fuck I should give Leighton.

The ideas running through my head were more suited for a hopefully near future when we lived together. He missed cooking. He said he wasn’t awesome at it, but it’d once been a nice distraction for him. He liked doing it.

I’d already signed the papers for a new place in Lincoln Towers, but I was dragging my feet with the actual moving part. I’d rent this time. Next time I bought my own place, I wanted it to be a house.

So, another idea for a gift was obviously a key. If I moved out, I wanted Leighton to come with us. I’d become so used to having him near me every day that I wasn’t sure I could consider the alternative. But Alex really missed having her own room, and nobody could blame her.

We lost our first hour focusing solely on Alex’s gifts. Leighton bought more than that slime kit, and I couldn’t help but feel ridiculously good about their Lemon and Nugget connection. He was genuinely fond of her, and that mattered to me.

I definitely spent too much money on her, and I didn’t see that stopping anytime soon. I was never going to be the stand-in parent Kat could be, so I had to make it up to the girl somehow.

Before we got in line, Leighton came up with an idea to put together what he called an activity basket for the kids in the Quinn family. Shit they could do together—and he included stuff for kids of all ages. Crafts, tools, more slime kits, some toys, and jewelry-making kits. In short, a big-ass basket with something for everyone. I couldn’t lie; I wished I’d come up with that sooner for my nephews. It took a lot of pressure off, and he didn’t have to buy individual gifts for all two thousand of them.

“We’re gonna need extra luggage on the flight,” I said.

He chuckled.

Once that was out of the way, we dropped everything off in my truck before we steeled ourselves for the second round.

Christmas was fucking exhausting.

December 24th, 2024

I yawned as I drove past the sign welcoming me to Camassia Cove.

After a night in a hotel close to the airport in Seattle, we’d checked out at four in the fucking morning so we could get to the Quinns’ hometown early. On the flip side, I appreciated a peaceful drive when both Alex and Leighton fell asleep in the back seat.

Strong coffee and silence kept me company.

I always felt somewhat removed from the real world on the West Coast, but it was certainly beautiful here. Lush forests and glimpses of the ocean painted the early dawn scene, and it almost made me wish we could’ve brought Alex’s main gift. It’d be fun to explore the woods here, and we’d get our chance since we’d be staying with Darius and Gray. They had a guest cabin for us, and they lived in the middle of nowhere up in the mountains.

Instead, Alex was gonna have to wait. We’d brought everything else, and then she’d get her purple ATV when we got home.

I yawned again.

Alex had her head on Leighton’s shoulder, and both were gonna catch flies sleeping with their mouths open like that.

It was cute as fuck.

Shira was supposed to call me in a couple hours, and I hoped she had nothing to report. Not yet. It’d be nice to get throughthe holidays before I refocused on our new case. But chances were, she did have something, considering what Intel had dug up yesterday.

Omar Said had just purchased land north of Richmond, and the interesting part was that he’d done it in his own name. It screamed smoke and mirrors to me, but it was something we had to keep an eye on anyway.

I kept following the GPS, and we eventually reached a bridge that took us over a river and up into the mountains to the north. Zero shock that Darius Quinn lived up here. Zero.

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