Page 108 of Santa Daddy
We shot up the ramp like something being chased.
Snow-slick streets blurred past—the city just going about its business, no idea its favorite monster was barreling through red lights with his pregnant fake wife in tow.
“What was that?” I forced out over the roar of engine and blood in my ears. My voice sounded small, scraped raw.
“A message,” he said, eyes on the road. His accent was heavier now, words short and hard. “They want me to know nowhere is safe.”
“‘They’ being…?” My fingers dug into the seat. “Your cousin and…whoever else?”
He took a corner harder than any driver’s ed teacher would approve. The SUV held, grudgingly. “Whoever pays more for you,” he said. “Whoever thinks they can hurt me fastest.”
My skin crawled.
His shirt was soaked through now, the blood spreading across his chest like spilled ink. His left hand gripped the wheel; his right stayed close to the console, near another hidden compartment.
“You’re losing a lot of blood,” I said. “You should?—”
“I will not die from this,” he cut in. “Stop looking at me like I am about to disappear.”
“You just stabbed your own man in front of me,” I whispered. “You don’t get to pretend this is…normal.”
“He stopped being my man when he pointed gun at you,” Konstantin said. “Loyalty has…short shelf life around me.”
He said it like a fact, not an excuse.
We finally slid to a stop in front of a building that was the opposite of the penthouse.
Rust stains on cracked concrete. Flickering fluorescent above the entry. A smell of cigarettes, fried food, and years of bad luck seeped out of the stairwell.
“This is it?” I asked. My voice shook. I didn’t try to hide it.
“Safe house,” he said. “Move.”
We climbed three flights of narrow stairs that felt like they might give way under his weight and my adrenaline. My hand kept drifting to my belly, like it was a magnet and my palm was metal.
He unlocked 3B with a key from somewhere—how many keys did one man carry?—and pushed the door open.
The apartment inside was…not the worst place I’d ever seen. Small. Clean. Bare walls. A battered couch. Two chairs. Tiny kitchenette. Bathroom with tiles that had seen better decades and worse grout.
Not home.
But not on fire either.
Konstantin went straight to the bathroom, already stripping off his ruined shirt as he walked. White cotton peeled away from his skin, sticky with blood.
I followed because the alternative was standing in the living room and listening to my heartbeat try to escape my chest.
Under the shirt, the graze along his shoulder looked less like “nothing” and more like a high-velocity insult. The bullet had carved a groove across muscle, tearing skin open. Ugly. Bleeding. Not immediately fatal, but not something you shrugged off either.
“You need a doctor,” I said, grabbing a towel off the rack and wetting it in the sink.
“I need distance,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and reaching for a black first-aid kit under the sink. Of course it was military-grade. Mesh pockets. Labeled compartments. Enough supplies to start a small clinic or patch an army. “And time to see who is left on my side.”
“You’re bleeding,” I repeated, pressing the towel around the wound. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “You can’t do either if you pass out.”
He gave me a look that would have made a me on any other day sit down and shut up.
I didn’t.
