House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) - Sarah J. Maas Page 0,218

to talk to him about whatever was eating her up, Hunt landed quietly before sliding onto the bench’s wooden planks, the box between them. “What’s up?”

Bryce stared out at the river. She looked drained. Like that first night he’d seen her, in the legion’s holding center.

She still wasn’t looking at him when she said, “Danika would have been twenty-five today.”

Hunt went still. “It’s … Today’s Danika’s birthday.”

She glanced to her phone, discarded at her side. “No one remembered. Not Juniper or Fury—not even my mom. Last year, they remembered, but … I guess it was a onetime thing.”

“You could have asked them.”

“I know they’re busy. And …” She ran a hand through her hair. “Honestly, I thought they’d remember. I wanted them to remember. Even just a message saying something bullshitty, like I miss her or whatever.”

“What’s in the box?”

“Chocolate croissants,” she said hoarsely. “Danika always wanted them on her birthday. They were her favorite.”

Hunt looked from the box to her, then to the looming Bone Quarter across the river. How many croissants had he seen her eating these weeks? Perhaps in part because they connected her to Danika the same way that scar on her thigh did. When he looked back at her, her mouth was a tight, trembling line.

“It sucks,” she said, her voice thick. “It sucks that everyone just … moves on, and forgets. They expect me to forget. But I can’t.” She rubbed at her chest. “I can’t forget. And maybe it’s fucking weird that I bought my dead friend a bunch of birthday croissants. But the world moved on. Like she never existed.”

He watched her for a long moment. Then he said, “Shahar was that for me. I’d never met anyone like her. I think I loved her from the moment I laid eyes on her in her palace, even though she was so high above me that she might as well have been the moon. But she saw me too. And somehow, she picked me. Out of all of them, she picked me.” He shook his head, the words creaking from him as they crept from that box he’d locked them in all this while. “I would have done anything for her. I did anything for her. Anything she asked. And when it all went to Hel, when they told me it was over, I refused to believe it. How could she be gone? It was like saying the sun was gone. It just … there was nothing left if she wasn’t there.” He ran a hand through his hair. “This won’t be a consolation, but it took me about fifty years before I really believed it. That it was over. Yet even now …”

“You still love her that much?”

He held her gaze, unflinching. “After my mother died, I basically fell into my grief. But Shahar—she brought me out of that. Made me feel alive for the first time. Aware of myself, of my potential. I’ll always love her, if only for that.”

She looked to the river. “I never realized it,” she murmured. “That you and I are mirrors.”

He hadn’t, either. But a voice floated back to him. You look how I feel every day, she’d whispered when she’d cleaned him up after Micah’s latest assignment. “Is it a bad thing?”

A half smile tugged at a corner of her mouth. “No. No, it isn’t.”

“No issue with the Umbra Mortis being your emotional twin?”

But her face grew serious again. “That’s what they call you, but that’s not who you are.”

“And who am I?”

“A pain in my ass.” Her smile was brighter than the setting sun on the river. He laughed, but she added, “You’re my friend. Who watches trashy TV with me and puts up with my shit. You’re the person I don’t need to explain myself to—not when it matters. You see everything I am, and you don’t run away from it.”

He smiled at her, let it convey everything that glowed inside him at her words. “I like that.”

Color stained her cheeks, but she blew out a breath as she turned toward the box. “Well, Danika,” she said. “Happy birthday.”

She peeled off the tape and flipped back the top.

Her smile vanished. She shut the lid before Hunt could see what was inside.

“What is it?”

She shook her head, making to grab the box—but Hunt grabbed it first, pulling it onto his lap and opening the lid.

Inside lay half a dozen croissants, carefully arranged in a pile. And on the top one, artfully written in a