Page 136 of Santa Daddy
His mouth curved, sleepy and dangerous. “Do you?”
I met his eyes. No gun to my head now. No council. No Christmas Eve circus.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
He laughed softly. Really laughed. It sounded new.
“Fifty years,” he said. “You think we’ll make it that long?”
In his world, fifty years was an outrageous joke. In ours—this new, fragile, stolen world—it felt like a promise.
“We survived everything else,” I said, pressing a kiss to the scar over his heart. “I like our odds.”
Silence settled over us. Not the loaded kind that comes before violence. Real silence. Peaceful. The heater hummed. A truck rumbled by on the road outside. Somewhere in the next room, a TV droned faintly through the wall.
“What happens tomorrow?” I asked, part of me wanting to leave the question alone.
“Tomorrow,” he said, arms tightening around me, “we disappear properly. New names again. New jobs. The man who pulled that trigger in the alley? He stays dead.”
“And the woman who saw him?” I asked.
“She gets to start over,” he said simply.
“Good,” I said. “I was tired of her anyway.”
He huffed a quiet laugh. “What do you want to be in our new life?”
Everything. Nothing. Yours.
“Happy,” I said. “I just want to be happy.”
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I almost thought he’d fallen asleep.
“I want to teach her to braid flower crowns,” he said at last. “Like my grandmother did for me.”
Our daughter.
Tatiana.
Not born yet, already pulling the past into something gentler.
“She’ll love that,” I whispered, letting myself imagine a little girl with his eyes and my stubborn chin, standing in a garden instead of a kill zone.
A beginning, not an ending.
As sleep pulled me under, I felt his lips press to my hair and heard him whisper something in Russian that sounded like a blessing.
Tomorrow would ask for more decisions. More reinvention.
Tonight, we were just us.
Perfectly. Completely. Devastatingly us.
EPILOGUE
TWO YEARS LATER – OREGON COAST
Dani
