Page 110 of Santa Daddy
Then he went into motion.
He checked the windows. The locks. Pulled cushions off the couch to expose the steel plate bolted into the wall behind it. Opened a door that looked like a closet and revealed a narrow safe with a keypad. Cash. Passports. Weapons. Burner phones.
He did it all fast, efficient, like he’d rehearsed it a hundred times.
“Where are we going?” I asked from the doorway, suddenly exhausted. “Or am I still on a strict ‘need-to-know’ diet?”
“Out of city,” he said, stuffing cash and guns into a plain duffel. “Somewhere they do not own doors and cameras. Somewhere I can see who is hunting us.”
“Them being your cousin and whoever sent his puppy in the garage,” I said.
“And anyone who smiles too quickly when they hear my name,” he said. “I find out who signed on with Maksim, then I decide who breathes next year.”
Violent. Cold. Terrifying.
And in a twisted way, the only thing that made me feel like we might make it out of this.
“And if I don’t want to keep running?” I asked, hand splaying over my belly without permission. “If I want to…stop? Breathe? Not raise a kid in a moving target?”
He paused in the middle of zipping the bag.
Looked at me.
“I will build you house where no one finds you,” he said. “Later.”
“Later,” I echoed. “When there’s no one left to shoot at you.”
“Da,” he said. “When I am finished.”
He slung the duffel over his good shoulder and jerked his chin at the door. “Come.”
We headed down the narrow, echoing stairwell toward whatever borrowed car waited below. My hand stayed on my stomach the whole way, whispering a prayer to whatever deity handled terrible timing and worse men.
The war had finally stepped through our front door.
Now we had to find a way to survive it long enough to decide if this baby was going to grow up knowing who their father really was?—
Or if we’d be stories told in someone else’s cautionary tale.
22
WOLVES AND WILDERNESS
KONSTANTIN
The cabin squatted in the trees like a forgotten grave.
Sagging porch. Peeling paint. Roof bowed under the weight of old snow. My father had marked it on one of his maps years ago—a place you went when the city was trying to kill you and you weren’t quite ready to let it.
Perfect for a honeymoon from hell.
My shoulder burned under the bandage, a steady throb of heat and pressure. Dani had wrapped it tight, but blood still soaked through in dark blossoms. Pain was just information. It said I was alive. Alive meant I could still put bullets in the men who were trying to take everything from me.
Keep watch. Stay upright. Don’t let the blood loss make you sloppy.
I stood by the one decent window in the main room, Glock within easy reach, eyes sweeping the tree line. Snow sat heavy on the pines, branches creaking under the load. The forest wasquiet in that old way that reminded you how small and fragile humans really were.
How easily we disappeared.
