Page 1 of Daddy's Christmas Rescue
Chapter one
Blake
My crew knew to hold off anything until I’d done the last walk-through. Not just the demolition, obviously for safety, but a final sign off. That was how I’d ended up with Biscuit—the half-starved mutt who’d stared at me with those huge brown eyes like he’d already given up on being wanted. Sam, the local vet, fixed him up. Biscuit lived like a king now.
I should’ve been living just as well. But the house I went home to every night stayed too damn quiet.
The house had been warm last night, but only because I kept it that way for Biscuit. In the summer he came to every site with me, but it was too cold this time of year. He was waiting for me, tail thumping against the tile, wagging like he was made of springs. I dropped to my knees and held out my arms. He barreled straight into me, tongue out, pink and ridiculous against my jaw.
“Miss me?” My voice came out rough, stupidly hopeful.
Biscuit whined and pressed his head against my chest. I held him for a long minute, letting the ache in my shoulders bleedout. He didn’t care that I was too big, or that I didn’t talk enough, or that I had a temper.
He just cared that I came home.
I hadn’t expected to be thirty-seven and alone except for a dog. I hadn’t expected to run Dad’s company, either. He built it from the ground up—Weston Construction—every beam and nail by hand. He died on-site. Electrical fault, instant. No warning. No goodbye.
The insurance company promised Mom they’d take care of everything. She believed them — hell, we both did. That was before I learned what words like policy exclusions and claim disputes really meant.
They stalled. They delayed. They found loopholes no human being could’ve predicted. “Technical discrepancy,” they said. “Missing documentation.”
Dad had done everything right, and they still walked away smiling. Crooks in suits.
By the time the final denial came through, the business was hanging by a thread. Mom tried to hold it together by taking double shifts, stopped eating right. The stress did what the grief hadn’t. The stroke came a year later, middle of the night.
And all because some insurance fat cats decided she wasn’t worth the payout.
I rebuilt the company, but I rebuilt it angrily. And careful. I didn’t trust paperwork, or people in nice offices, or anyone who smiled while they shook your hand.
I tried to picture what it would be like to come home and have someone waiting. Not a dog—a person. Someone who didn’t mind the silence. Someone soft. Someone who needed taking care of, who wouldn’t flinch if my voice came out too rough, who’d see through all the armor and not run.
“Weston, you walking through or can we go ahead?” Dave called from outside. The crew was itching to wrap up—three daysleft before Christmas break, and everyone was already halfway gone in their heads.
I wasn’t. Not after the way my chest had felt all morning, tight and heavy. I shook it off and stepped into the building.
The smell hit first—stale cigarettes, damp insulation, old wood swelling with rot. My boots echoed across the bare concrete, the sound bouncing through the empty shell of rooms. The men waited by their trucks, watching the door. I didn’t call them in. Tradition said we never did the final sweep together, and instinct—my dad’s voice in the back of my skull—told me to keep them out this time.
A flash of red on the floor stopped me short.
A satin ribbon. Clean, bright, wildly out of place in a building moments from demolition. Too delicate for any of the guys. Too small for my hands. My gut tightened, that familiar prickle deep in my spine—the one that had kept me alive more than once when I was deployed.
“Hello?” My voice echoed off drywall and exposed beams. “Anyone in here?”
Silence answered, but not the harmless kind. This silence crept up the walls and under the skin, the sort that made you listen harder, breathe quieter.
I moved through the rooms the way Dad had drilled into me since I was old enough to help—check corners, look for movement, feel the air shift, trust the instinct that whispers before logic catches up.
The quiet had teeth.
“Listen,” I said, low and steady. “If you’re in here, you’re not in trouble. But you need to come out. It’s not safe. We’re setting charges soon.”
Nothing. Just the building settling around me.
Then—a sound so small most people would’ve missed it. A whimper. Thin, scared, raw.
You don’t forget how to hear fear once you’ve learned.
I followed it to a cardboard box shoved behind a door, taped and torn like someone thought they could hide inside the walls and vanish.
