Page 92 of Santa Daddy
“Next time you try to escape,” he said, not looking at me, “you do it better.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You think I do not know you will try?” His mouth quirked, not kindly. “You are not quiet girl. You are all claws and bad ideas.”
“I wasn’t?—”
“Do not insult me with lie,” he cut in. “You take bag. You use moment when I am out. You push elevator that was locked before. You go to lobby. This is not walk,kotyonok. This is test.”
He flicked a glance at me then, eyes sharp.
“You fail,” he added.
My heart kicked against my ribs. Anger flared up to meet it.
“I’m not a prisoner,” I said.
A small, humorless sound left his throat. “This conversation says otherwise.”
The doors slid open onto the penthouse foyer.
He set the duffel down by the console with deliberate care, then turned to face me fully.
“You do not lie to me,” he said quietly. No raised voice. No slammed hands. Just flat steel. “If you want to run, you say. If you are unhappy, you say. Secrets get people killed in my world.”
His world.
Not ours.
“You’re the one with secrets,” I shot back before I could stop myself. “Locked doors. Wiped phones. Mysteriouskroshkason your call history. Don’t lecture me about honesty.”
Something flickered behind his eyes. A shadow. A flash of something too fast to pin down.
Then it was gone.
“You are my wife,” he said. “My responsibility. My problem.” His jaw flexed. “If you disappear, they use you against me, or they put you in ground. I will not allow either.”
Not because he loved me.
Because I was a liability he intended to manage.
“Next time you feel like running,” he added, voice dropping, “remember lobby. There is nowhere you go that I do not see.”
With that, he turned and walked down the hall toward his office, coat still damp, shoulders still dusted with half-melted snow.
The security camera in the corner blinked its little red eye at me.
I stood in the foyer alone, the echo of the elevator doors still in my bones, the weight of what I hadn’t told him pressing against my skin.
My hand drifted to my stomach.
Flat, still. No bump. No sign from the outside that anything was different.
But I knew.
There was life there.
A secret that lived and grew and demanded to be acknowledged with every passing hour.
