Page 41 of Santa Daddy
Something fragile and lethal lived in her expression. Like she was teetering on the edge of a cliff and seriously considering either jumping or shoving me first.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she whispered.
Echo of my own lie shoved back in my face.
Liar.
“Doesn’t it?” I asked.
The question hung there, thick as the snow-heavy clouds outside.
She didn’t answer. Slight lift of her chin. Stubbornness and terror in equal measure.
After a few beats, she closed her eyes and went still, faking sleep badly. I could feel the tension vibrating under her skin. Exhaustion would take her eventually. For now, she pretended.
I lay awake beside her in the dark, listening to the faint ticking of the thermostat, the muted whoosh of the HVAC, the blink of the tree’s lights reflecting on the glass.
I watched her.
Catalogued the curve of her mouth, the way her lashes lay against her cheeks, the faint bruise already forming on her shoulder where I’d bitten her. She looked nothing like the woman who’d chucked a paperweight at bulletproof glass and tried to crack my skull with a lamp.
Too late for both versions.
The thing twisting in my chest wasn’t guilt. That had been burned out of me a long time ago.
It was more dangerous.
I was starting to care.
Caring in my world was a liability. Caring got you sloppy. Got you dead. Got your people dead.
She was becoming a weakness.
And I knew, with the cold clarity that sat under the heat, that I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
Couldn’t.
Whatever this was—possession, obsession, a slow-motion self-destruct—it had its claws in too deep to dig out without killing something vital.
My something.
I eased out of bed eventually, unwilling to jostle her too much. She murmured something in her sleep and curled further into the sheets that smelled like us, like sex and sweat and my cologne.
The sight of her in my bed, in my world, marked in ways no one else would see but I would know, stirred that possessive, feral thing again.
Mine.
I crossed to the window and looked out over the city.
Snow drifted lazily down from a sky turned the color of old steel. Christmas lights sparkled on distant buildings, trying to convince everyone this time of year meant peace.
Down there, my enemies were planning. Watching. Waiting for me to slip. For my attention to shift from the chessboard to the girl I’d just pulled into the game.
They were already talking about liabilities and complications. Already wondering if I’d gone soft.
Maybe I had.
I tightened my jaw.
