Page 125 of Don't Shoot Me Santa
Aaron would see to that.
And Kenny would watch him knitting that fragile dog back together, piece by careful piece, as if with every bit of progress, Aaron would mend himself, too. And all the while, Kenny would be doing the same to him. Quietly. Patiently. Stitch by stitch.
On the screen, two strangers leaned into a too-perfect kiss beneath a tinsel-strangled tree. Aaron shifted, pressing closer, tucking his cheek into the curve of Kenny’s chest and Kenny kissed the crown of his head, lingering his lips there. It was hard not to speak. Not to ask how he was, or what he needed.Or to ask the question burning on his tongue for a while. But that was the point of a safeword. It didn’t mean explain. It meantstop.It meantthis.Letting Aaron breathe. Letting him decide when to stand. When to speak. When to begin again. Not just the story. But life.
Christmas.
Them.
Then, suddenly, “Why Skye?”
Kenny exhaled. He’d hoped Aaron would ask. Not because it was fair. But because silence dishonoured her. And Kenny had made a career out of finding thewhy.Even when it hurt. So he drew Aaron closer, sifting his fingers gently through his limp hair.
“She was visible,” he said quietly. “And brave. And herself.”
Aaron remained fixed on the television. On some glossy, low-budget Christmas film piping out forced joy and plastic reconciliation. A perfect family carving turkey, all grins and paper crowns, pretending the past hadn’t left a mark. Kenny shifted, careful not to dislodge Aaron from his chest. At their feet, Chaos gave a whine in his sleep, paws scrabbling gently at whatever dreamscape he’d found, and Kenny glanced down before returning his gaze to the screen.
A family pretending Christmas healed things.
He wanted to scoff. Because that was the myth, wasn’t it? That one day of tinsel and sugar could wipe clean a year of damage. That pain paused for stuffing and crackers. That love, even fractured and conditional, could be wrapped in redand forgiven. But that wasn’t how trauma worked. That wasn’t how families like the Harrows broke.
No—it wasbecauseof Christmas they had shattered.
Because the season demanded cheer from people who were bleeding. Because judgment wrapped itself in scripture and sugar cookies. Because families were forced into rooms together, smiling with knives under their tongues.
And Skye…
Skye had stood in the middle of that, visible in a world that punished difference.
And so he continued. For her sake.
“Jonathon’s pathology was built on control.” He rubbed his lips into Aaron’s hair. “On the idea of righteousness. Order. He’d been raised to believe deviation was sin. That softness had to be corrected. Skye… challenged that by existing. She was unapologetic. She didn’t try to fit. Or hide. And for someone like Jonathon who’d been conditioned to believe identity must be obeyed, Skye’s truth was unbearable.”
He paused, letting it settle. Letting the weight of it be real.
“She wasn’t weak.” Kenny drew Aaron closer. “She wasn’t targeted because she was vulnerable. She was targeted because she was powerful. Because she lived on her own terms. And people like Jonathon… they don’t know how toexistwithout terms. They need boundaries. Binaries. Hierarchies. Control. She defied that simply by existing.”
Aaron closed his eyes, lashes tickling Kenny’s chest, but Kenny knew he was listening. Because he asked,
“Could she have been saved? Could someone have stopped him earlier?”
“Maybe.” Kenny chewed on his lip. “If the right people had been looking. If the systems built to protect the victims hadn’t already written them off.”
Aaron tensed. Chaos gave a small sigh at their feet. Lucky whimpered.
“Vulnerable victims often fall through the cracks.” Kenny exhaled, threaded with frustration, with that old, bone-deep exasperation that after all the research, all the inquiries, all the lessons written in blood, nothing had changed. “Their records don’t always match their reality. Names are misfiled. Pronouns ignored. Investigations stall over technicalities that wouldn’t exist for anyone else. They get called complicated. Difficult. High risk. Their disappearances dismissed as lifestyle choices instead of red flags.” Kenny held Aaron closer, needing the weight of him there. With him. “That’s queer kids on the streets. Kids who ran from places that didn’t want them. Girls forced into lives they never chose. Boys picked up and used, turned into someone’s mule or worse. And without a stable home to return to, there’s no safety net. No one to pull them back. And more often no one askswhythey ran. No one wonders what they were runningfrom. They’re seen as reckless, as troubled, as disposable. So when they go missing, or end up dead… it’s written off. Accident. Suicide. Overdose. Never part of a larger pattern. Never linked together. Because they weren’t seen as connected. But individual tragedies.”
Aaron was silent but Kenny could feel him burning with rage. He’d been one of those kids once. And while he now had a safe place to land, someone fighting for him and pulling him back when he got lost, he knew he was lucky.
“Jonathon wasn’t the first to exploit that,” Kenny went on quietly. “And he won’t be the last. But if there’s any small mercy in what’s happened, it’s that he’s forced the system to look at the victims it keeps failing to see.”
Aaron twisted to gaze up at Kenny, eyes wide with a need to know. Kenny understood that look all too well. “Why here? Why now? Was it cause of me?”
“No. Not to start. Jonathon kept away from the island until this year. He timed the killings with his Christmas holidays. I’ll assume, and perhaps you could clarify if you everwanted to go back to the dog shelter, he’d been volunteering there a while but always took extended breaks at Christmas. He likely has connections in Glasgow. Southampton. Portsmouth. I guarantee there are more. Maybe through his mother. She likely got him into volunteering spaces using her trusted connections as a religious figure and educator. But none of them flagged because the systems didn’t connect the dots. Because they were logged under the wrong names, the wrong causes. Lost inside the very institutions that were supposed to protect them.”
Silence stretched between them. Heavy. Sacred.
And in that silence, Skye’s name lingered. Unspoken but present. Not erased.