Page 132 of Don't Shoot Me Santa

Then Kenny spun him gently, and Aaron faced him again.

Everything stopped for a moment.

The music. The firelight. The air in his lungs.

All of it narrowed to the space between them.

Kenny’s eyes roamed over him, devouring without haste. Aaron’s knees trembled.

“Kneel,” Kenny demanded.

And yeah, there was still that defiant spark in Aaron’s chest. The instinct to fight even when he didn’t want to. But it wasn’t stronger thanthis.What they had. How Kenny looked at him as if he was beautiful and needed both breaking and protecting.

So he dropped.

Down onto his knees, arms bound and tilted his head back.

Kenny exhaled like a man relieved, stroking one hand through Aaron’s hair, ruffling it back from his face, then cupped his chin with the other. “Good boy.”

Two words.

That’s all it took to melt Aaron’s chest. Deep. Trembling and starved and so fucking safe.

Then came theclinkof Kenny’s belt. The whisper of leather sliding free. And Aaron opened his mouth without being told. Eager. Obedient. Utterly given over.

Gluttonous.

Glorious.

Home.

Yeah. Christmas was pretty good.

Epilogue

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

Roisin set aside the Christmas card, tracing her thumb along the glitter-smeared cross on its front.

Back into isolation. Again. They called it for her own good, but she knew the truth. Always the truth. She had never hurt a soul. Not once. If the world chose not to believe her testimony, well…that was their sin, not hers.

She slipped the card back into its envelope. The glue was long undone, the paper thumbed through by grubby hands. Read by guards. Read by strangers. Nothing was private here. No sanctity. No decency. That was the real punishment. Not confinement, but intrusion.

At least she understood the scripture. The verse scrawled in that slanted hand, ferried from one womens’ correctional to another. The guards, fools that they were, would glance at it and see only piety—prayer, hope, the hollow comfort of the devout. But Roisin knew better. She had always known. The gospel was not truth; it was code. And scripture, when bent hard enough, would say exactly what you needed it to say.

Finally someone had shown her a shred of decency.Someone willing to pass along what her keepers had denied her for two long years.

The only thing that mattered.

Where her son was.

A sigh left her. And she brushed crumbs from her shapeless grey trousers, once again stripped of her own clothes. She had not asked to be targeted by some filthy little inmate. She had not asked to be the object of their jealousy, their petty violence. One crime weighed heavier than another, apparently. But hers? Nonexistent. Imagined. Of course. How could one rehabilitate from a crime that had never been committed?

She rose with composure, gliding towards the warped mirror bolted to the wall. Not glass, no. Plastic, scratched and dulled, incapable of shattering. Incapable of cutting. Foolish. As if real killers required such things. All living things had their own weapons. Hands, claws, teeth. That was enough. Always enough.

But the sharpest blade of all? The mind.

Dr Kenneth Lyons would agree.