Page 68 of Santa Daddy
Maybe both.
I studied his face. The blood on his knuckles. The careful way he’d wrapped my hand even while he lectured me.
He could say he was protecting me all he wanted.
But doors like that didn’t keep monsters out.
They kept them in.
“You’re not locking that door for me,” I said quietly. “You’re locking it for you.”
His jaw tightened. He didn’t argue.
He didn’t apologize either.
“There are cameras everywhere,” he said instead. “Except one small blind spot in hallway. You already found it. Clever girl.”
Ice slid down my spine.
“I see everything, Dani,” he added. My full name rolled off his tongue like something he owned. “Remember that.”
He pushed off the counter and walked away, leaving me on the stool with a throbbing hand, a burning brain, and way too much information.
The locks on the doors. The wiped phone. The butcher room down the hall. The blood on his knuckles.
He wasn’t just a man who’d made hard choices.
He was a man who’d built a whole infrastructure to make sure no one ever saw him bleed.
Whatever protection I was getting in here?
I was collateral.
He was the asset.
The cameras blinked in the corners, silent and red.
The blind spot in the hall felt a lot less like mercy and a lot more like a trap.
I flexed my bandaged hand and stared at the door he’d vanished through.
He wasn’t just protecting me from his world.
He was protecting his world from me.
14
TILL DEATH DO US PART
DANI
Seventy-two hours.
That’s how long I’d had to get used to the idea I was about to marry a man who’d executed someone in front of me between rows of Christmas trees. A man who kept a stainless-steel horror room behind a coded door. A man whose enemies wanted me dead and who called someonekroshkaon the phone like he didn’t already have a fake fiancée locked in his glass box.
Fake wedding,I kept telling myself.Fake, fake, fake.Say it fast enough and maybe my heart wouldn’t beat quite this hard.
The mirror wasn’t helping.
