Page 130 of Santa Daddy
The next sixhours were methodical chaos.
The passports arrived in an unmarked manila envelope slid under our motel door. No name. No return address. Just the faintest trace of Chanel and cigarette smoke on the paper.
Natasha.
“She’s the one who put the pregnancy test in the drawer,” Dani said quietly, thumbing the edge of her new ID. Different name. Same eyes.
“Her brother runs that factory I kept open last year,” I said. “This is how she decided to pay me back.”
We burned the old documents in the motel bathroom sink in a town that didn’t know my face.
There were border guards and bored officials with too much time and not enough imagination. There were favors called in from men who now owed their lives more to Dani’s bullet than to anything I’d done.
At one checkpoint, a guard studied our papers too long. My trigger finger twitched. Dani leaned against me, smiling up likeI’d just told her something soft, and stole a kiss that was half act, half truth.
Her eyes saidplay along.
His eyes slid away.
She was learning the game.
This time, we were playing it for ourselves.
“Tell me something,” she said later, when neutral territory and new laws were behind us and the highway stretched ahead, salt-scarred and empty.
“About before,” she added. “About who you were at the start of all this.”
I kept my focus on the road, though I could feel her gaze on the side of my face.
“You want truth?” I asked.
“Always,” she said.
“I was a monster,” I told her. “Efficient. Ruthless. Very good at one thing and one thing only.”
“Killing?” she asked, not flinching.
“Surviving,” I said. “The killing was just the quickest way to get there.”
“And now?” she asked.
Now.
Now there was her hand resting on her stomach in her sleep. The way she’d taken a shot meant for me without hesitation. The waymy own men had turned on me and for once the answer hadn’t been ‘shoot them faster,’ but ‘get her out.’
“Now?” I said quietly. “Maybe not so much.”
Maybe she’d dragged something human back up from where I’d buried it.
She didn’t push. The road unspooled beneath us. The world changed from bare forest to industrial outskirts to nowhere.
The motel we finally picked was the kind of anonymous that came with buzzing neon and a clerk who didn’t care what name you scribbled on the card.
Inside the room, everything was beige and faded floral. The air smelled like cleaning products and old cigarettes.
Home, for tonight.
The cream burnedlike fire on my ribs.
