Page 34 of Santa Daddy
Something moved behind his eyes. Not amusement. Something darker, heavier.
He stepped toward me.
Predator-smooth. Like the space between us was a decision he’d already made.
“No one was going to hurt you,” he said.
“Bullshit.” I backed up, bare soles sliding on cold marble. The silk of the dress whispered around my knees. “I heard what they said. I saw how they looked at me. Like a problem. Like something that needed… handling.”
Like something that could vanish, and the room would shrug and order another bottle.
“What did you think would happen?” His voice roughened, that dangerous edge creeping in. “That you’d walk into my world and everyone would clap and throw confetti? ‘Congratulations, Konstantin, on your stray from the Christmas tree lot’?”
“I didn’t choose your world!” The words tore out of me, sharp and jagged. “You dragged me into it. You and your stupid fake proposal and your?—”
“My what?” He closed the distance, winter coat brushing the silk at my hips. “My what, kotyonok?”
He smelled like cold air and expensive cologne and the restaurant’s wood smoke, all layered over the darker, male thing that had already become a problem for my nervous system.
Don’t say it. Don’t hand him the word. Don’t gift-wrap your insanity and tie it with a bow.
“Your everything,” I whispered.
It sounded pathetic even to me.
Silence fell heavy between us. The only sounds were the hum of the vents and the far-off city and my own heartbeat punching my ribs.
His jaw tightened. A muscle flickered. For a second—just one—regret ghosted across his face. Or hunger. With Konstantin, those two things lived in the same bone structure.
“You want truth?” he asked, stepping forward again.
I kept moving back until my shoulders hit cool glass. Ice radiated through the thin silk, the opposite of the heat rolling off him as he caged me between his body and the window. The Christmas tree glowed in my peripheral vision, white lights reflecting in the glass around us like we were standing in a snow globe.
“You were dead the moment you saw what happened in that lot,” he said, voice low. “Dead, Dani. Only reason you breathe now is because I decided you were worth keeping alive.”
Worth keeping.
Like a pet.
Like a particularly interesting coat.
“If I didn’t want you alive,” he went on, every word another nail in the coffin he’d mentioned earlier, “you’d be under snow already. In that same lot. With a bullet in pretty head.”
A smart woman would’ve crumpled. A sane woman would’ve begged.
Instead, something reckless flared in my veins, hot as gunpowder.
“Then stop acting like a man who’s already digging the grave,” I shot back.
There it was.
The thing neither of us wanted to say out loud: that I was one decision away from a shallow hole and some pine needles, and he was one bad day away from making that call.
His eyes flashed.
Beautiful, lethal, pale. Like winter light over frozen river.
The air between us crackled. All the things we weren’t saying—about bodies and choices and the way I’d let him fuck me against his bedroom wall and groan his name like it mattered—hung between us.
