Page 129 of Santa Daddy
We’d survived the worst they could throw at us.
Whatever came next—cops, council, decisions about thrones and exile and new names—we wouldn’t face it alone.
We’d bought ourselves a future.
With blood on snow and a body against pine.
27
PHOENIX RISING
KONSTANTIN
Alexei’s voice was a low growl on the burner phone. “With Maksim gone, they’re tearing each other apart. Baranov will take what’s left—as long as you stay dead. His word, Kostya. You disappear. No one touches the girl or the child.”
I looked at Dani asleep in the passenger seat, one hand on her belly.
“Then Konstantin Zverev dies in that forest,” I said. “And no one follows what’s left of him.”
The gasoline hit the cabin walls in a rough, shining stripe and started to run.
The smell was sharp in the thin mountain air, cleaner than it had any right to be given what I was about to do.
I struck the match. Watched the flame shiver for half a heartbeat.
Then I tossed it into our past.
Fire roared up the boards in an instant, racing along dry wood and old varnish. The cabin—our last battlefield, our first almost-home—went up fast. Smoke rolled into the gray sky, carrying with it months of whispered confessions, traps, blood, and Maksim’s final echoes.
Burn it all.
Leave nothing anyone can use against us.
Dani stood beside me, face lit in gold and orange. One hand was pressed over her stomach, guarding the small life inside. The woman who’d walked into a tree lot in candy-cane tights was gone.
In her place was someone harder. Sharper. More dangerous.
My weapon. My salvation. My ruin.
“You sure?” I asked, watching the flames chew through the roof. “Once we walk away, there’s no going back. No more safety nets. No more empire at our backs.”
She looked at me, eyes steady despite the worry thrumming just under her skin.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything,” she said.
Christ.
When she looked at me like that, I could almost believe in things like fate.
I kissed her—hard, greedy, tasting smoke and endings and something that felt suspiciously like a beginning. Her hands curled into my jacket and held on like the fire behind us was an afterthought.
When we finally broke apart, both breathing hard, she gave me that defiant, brilliant smile that had been my undoing from the start.
“Let’s go disappear,” she whispered.
Disappear.
Or finally show up as the men and woman we were supposed to be.
