Page 131 of Santa Daddy
I sat shirtless on the edge of the bed, jaw locked, while the harsh chemical ate into the old black ink that had marked me as Bratva for more than half my life. The intricate symbols blurred, then smeared, then started to fade.
“Does it hurt?” Dani asked, easing herself down beside me with the care that came with first-trimester fatigue.
“Like being reborn,” I said.
I heard myself and snorted. “Listen to me,” I added. “Getting philosophical over cheap tattoo remover.”
She laughed, bright in the dingy room. “You’re not erasing who you were,” she said. “You’re claiming who you are.”
Who I am.
Not who they’d bent me into.
Who I chose to be.
It shouldn’t have hit as hard as it did. But it settled in my bones like something I’d been waiting to hear since before I knew the words for it.
“So,” she said after a moment, shifting until her thigh pressed warm against mine, “what are we naming our little girly-girl criminal?”
“Our little…” The way she saidournever got old. “You’re just assuming it’s a girl?”
“Mother’s intuition,” she said. Her fingers slid into mine, weaving tight. “And besides, the world needs more dangerous women.”
Like you, I thought. God help anyone who tried to hurt what was ours.
We argued names for close to an hour.
Every Russian option I suggested got a wrinkled nose. Every soft, airy thing she floated got vetoed on principle. We weren’t just naming a child—we were daring to plan for a future.
“Tatiana,” she said finally.
The name rolled off her tongue soft and sure. “Strong. Beautiful. Hard to ignore.”
Like her mother.
The name hit me in an unexpected place. A small kitchen. A woman’s hands smelling of earth and sugar.
“My grandmother,” I said, voice rougher than I liked. “Her name was Tatiana.”
Dani’s eyes sharpened. “Tell me,” she said.
“She had a garden,” I said slowly. “Behind the old house. Every Sunday she’d drag me out of bed before the sun came up. Not because she needed the help—because those were ours. A couple hours before my father or anyone else woke up.”
I could see it as I spoke: the tilled earth, the way the light hit the flowers, her crouched in the dirt with her skirt hiked up and no dignity left to pretend with.
“She’d sit me in the soil,” I went on, “and show me how to braid stems. Her hands smelled like vanilla from the cookies she’d bake after. She’d make these ridiculous crowns out of wildflowers and put them on my head, call me her little prince.”
Dani smiled, eyes bright.
“She told me stories,” I said. “Not fairy tales. Stories about men who weren’t born good, who had to decide, every day, not to be cruel. She’d look at me like she could see straight through to whatever I was hiding and say, ‘Kostya, you have your father’s strength. You don’t have to have his heart.’”
I swallowed.
“She believed I could be something else,” I finished. “Even when I was already proving her wrong.”
“How old were you when she died?” Dani asked quietly.
“Twelve,” I said. The word felt like a door closing. “After that, there was no one left telling me I had a choice.”
