Page 26 of Don't Shoot Me Santa

Kenny caught the deflection for what it was. A quick pivot to take the edge off the truth he’d just dropped. And yet, under the surface, the warning still pulsed, refusing to be smoothed away.

Parry turned to Kenny. “We’d appreciate your help with any triggers or signatures we might miss. We’ve got good people, but none with your background.”

Kenny didn’t answer immediately.

He was already seeing the shape of it. Already hearing the quiet logic behind the staging. He met Aaron’s gaze. Asked for his permission.

“Send what you have,” Aaron breathed out. “He’ll take a look.”

Kenny gave the smallest nod.

So he was in.

Parry nodded and moved off to brief her team.

Kenny glanced at Aaron. “You okay?”

“We’re standing in the middle of a fake winter wonderland next to a staged corpse. You tell me.”

“That’s not a no.”

“You want me to ask you to hold me here?”

“You can.”

Aaron said nothing. But he reached for his hand. Laced their fingers. And Kenny gripped it, stroking his thumb along Aaron’s.

The wind picked up as they stood there with Christmas music drifting from a nearby shop, muffled and wrong, lyrics bending around the cold. And the boy beneath the tree stayed still, a gift no one had asked for, wrapped in a symbol no one would forget.

Chapter Five

I Just Wanna Make Love To You

After having to watch Kenny sink back intothatheadspace, the one where his brows did the thing and all he spoke in was “hmms” and “maybes” as if channelling a ghost at a faculty meeting, Aaron needed a goddamn medal for not climbing him in the Co-Op.

Kenny wasn’tpresent. Not really. Not while they wandered the aisles for dinner bits. He was somewhere else entirely, halfway between behavioural theory and corpse logistics, hardly blinking as Aaron snuck a few extras into the basket. Some fancy treats for himself. A chew toy for Chaos. A six-pack of luxury mince pies that absolutely weren’t on the list. And one of the expensive bottles of Merlot.

Kenny didn’t notice until they got to the till and reached for his wallet. Yeah, the bloke still carried one. With cards. And cash. Forty-four and thought he was still in the nineties, whereas the only currency Aaron used was his phone and his looks.

The look Kenny gave him then, however, didn’t have the same appeal. It was the devastating, judgey one. Eyebrow raised at Aaron’s betrayal of the household budget.

Aaron shrugged. “I’m a millionaire, remember?”

Kenny wouldn’t argue. He couldn’t. Because Aaronwasa millionaire. Technically. Or, well, had been for a limited amount of time before he’d given it all away. Inheritor of blood money and family secrets no sane person would ever envy, he’d never enjoyed seeing it in a bank account belonging to Aaron Jones. Because that cash came courtesy of two notorious psychopaths and a trail of bodies still keeping the tabloids foaming. So he donated regularly to charities, paid for dog kennels at the shelter and bagged a job out of it, and once sent an anonymous sum to a survivor of his parents’ spree. A woman he’d found out had been eight years old when his dad tried to kill her in their basement.

He shivered then. But he swallowed it down, as had become his norm when thinking about his bloodline.

The money, though, had now dwindled after all that. And they still had bills to pay. And whilst Kenny supported every donation Aaron had made with that inheritance, they still needed to live. Hence them both getting jobs.

Kenny sighed and tapped his card as if he was personally bankrolling a small, ethically questionable empire. But Aaron, smug as sin, strutted out of the Co-Op dreaming of indulging his lust with overpriced, gold-dusted mince pies instead of Kenny’s cock.

Although…fuck, hewashorny again.

Still.

Whatever.

Maybe that was his other Pavlovian kink. Not just praise and edging and being told he was a good boy, but watching Kenny turn into a brooding crime-fighting mind reader who stared at bloodstains and broken people andunderstood.