Page 116 of Santa Daddy
The baby.
I was still recalibrating to the idea there even was a baby. Dani’s voice echoing in my skull:I’m pregnant, you cold-blooded psycho.The shock. The brief, wild flash of something like hope before glass shattered and bullets started flying.
Our child. In the middle of this.
“He’s not just coming for you,” Alexei said. “He’s coming for your line. He means to finish it.”
Not just her.
Not just me.
Everything that might’ve come after us.
“Get me everything,” I said. My voice dropped into that register that usually preceded funerals. “Names. Locations. Typical patterns. I want to know when they piss and who they call afterward.”
“Already pulled most of it,” he said, handing over a thick folder. “Weapons, security details, family.”
Family.
The old me would’ve flipped open the file and started selecting daughters and brothers and aging mothers to send home piece by piece, a message carved in bone.
But Dani had rewired something fundamental in me. Made me ask—for the first time—if more blood was fixing anything or just another symptom of the same disease.
You can’t keep her safe with clean hands, the rational part of me said. Not here. Not like this.
“Konstantin.” Alexei stepped in, lowering his voice. “You could still run.”
He meantwe. Me, Dani, the baby. Disappear off the grid, new names, new lives. Some small town where the worst violence was a bar fight over a game on TV.
“No.” The word came out harder than I’d intended. “If we run, they follow. This ends here or it never ends.”
Besides, where would I take her? What the hell kind of life could I give her looking over our shoulders for the next fifty years?
This wasn’t just elimination anymore. Not housekeeping. Not strategy.
This was personal.
This was love expressed in the only way my world understood: annihilation.
I’m not killing them because they’re my enemies. I’m killing them because they threatened my family.
“There’s something you need to understand,” I said, forcing the words out around the knot in my throat. “She’s not leverage anymore. Not convenient. Not strategic.”
Alexei’s eyes flicked up, sharp. In all the years we’d worked together, I’d never admitted to needing anything that wasn’t measurable in money or ground.
“She’s my future,” I said. The honesty scraped my throat raw. “The only one I want. They reach for that…” I let the sentence trail off.
He didn’t need me to finish it.
They’d learn, the hard way, why people whispered my name with fear.
“Understood,” he said. And he did. “What do you need from me?”
“Time to get her somewhere they can’t shoot through the walls,” I said. “Then we move. And Alexei?”
“Yeah?”
“No survivors,” I said. “Not one.”
