Page 115 of Santa Daddy
“Timeline?” I asked.
“Twenty-four hours. Maybe less.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and thumbed through files, holding it so the dim light hit the screen. “They’ve been watching the safe houses, the clubs, even the legit businesses. They know your patterns. Your people. Your soft points.”
Images stared back at me.
Long-lens shots of my buildings. Men I recognized standing outside my own front doors, unaware of the cameras pointed at them. Cars parked one block off my usual routes. Masked figures moving through alleys near places that were supposed to be secure.
They’d been planning this for weeks.
While I’d been falling in love, they’d been preparing to kill us.
“How many?” I asked.
“Fifty, that we can confirm. Maybe more.” He lit a cigarette, and I didn’t comment on the tremor in his fingers. “Enough to make it permanent if they hit all at once.”
Permanent.
End me. End her. End whatever kind of future we’d just accidentally created.
The anger that came was clean. Surgical. The kind that kept you sharp, not sloppy.
“Options,” I said.
“Hit first.” Alexei’s voice went flat, professional. “Fast and brutal. We take Maksim and his three top lieutenants off the board before they can synchronize. Decapitate the snake before it strikes.”
Strike first. Kill fast. Leave nothing breathing that can crawl back to us.
It was the obvious play. The only smart one.
“Konstantin?” he pressed. “What’s the call?”
Warm light from the cabin window spilled across the snow behind me. Inside that rectangle of gold: Dani, probably loading magazines she shouldn’t know how to handle, cursing my enemies in English and Spanish and whatever other languages she’d picked up from bad TV.
Choose.
Her safety or my conscience. Her life or what was left of my soul.
“Set it up,” I said. The words tasted like ash. “Maksim dies tonight. Anyone with him dies too.”
Blood for blood.
The only currency my world respects.
The old version of me would’ve smiled at that. Would’ve relished the upcoming hunt. This version—the one who’d held a woman while she slept and listened for two heartbeats in her body instead of one—felt nothing but necessity.
“I’m not done,” Alexei said quietly.
That tone meant personal.
“This isn’t just about power,” he went on. “It’s about her.”
Of course it was.
I said nothing. He continued.
“Maksim knows about the baby.”
For a second, the world tilted under my boots.
