If Hogan wasn’t so sloshed, from alcohol and whatever Clara had given him, I’d be on top of him in seconds, ripping out his throat with my claws. Regardless of the fact that Clara would see me shift in front of her. My secret would be out. Not that it mattered, if that was the price for keeping her alive.
But Hogan could barely hold his gun up. His finger wasn’t even on the trigger.
Clara drove the car forward, straight into her abuser and crushed the two-hundred-and something-pound man into his own garage door with her Subaru Outback.
She backed up, contemplating as he crumpled onto the frozen driveway.
Then she ran into him again, repeating the cycle at least half a dozen times.
My cock was painfully hard now as I watched the girl I loved reap the revenge I’m sure she deserved.
The Subaru’s tail lights flicked on, bathing the driveway in an ominous red glow one final time before she cut the engine andclimbed out of the car. She walked around the front of her car as calm as a cucumber.
I thought she would start to clean up after her crime, but instead she pulled off the wreath—the one she’d been trying to perfect at her shop today—and disappeared inside.
I stifled an incredulous laugh when she walked back out a few minutes later with all the gore cleaned off and a new fresh bow tied to the smushed branches and affixed it to her bloody and beaten car hood with a smile. As if the wreath fixed everything.
I couldn’t help but stare in complete awe at this woman.
There wasn’t much I cared about these days. The fucks I had to give were spread thin between being Krampus and running the tree farm, but my attention and ability to give a fuck never seemed to wane when it came to Clara.
Ever since we were little kids, I’d seen her for what she was. Full of fire and joy and strength she didn’t let anyone else see. And she smelledso fucking good. Like fresh ginger, clean linen and coconut shampoo, though during the holidays she switched to peppermint. I’d go into her shop right around the first of December just to smell it lacing the air, the scent stronger and sweeter than any of her floral arrangements.
I always knew she was tough, but this side of her I’d never seen before.
A new plan unfurled in my mind.
It wasn’t Hogan needing my punishment—Clara had that handled herself.
She was a murderer. She’d been well within her right to kill her fiancé… but I was the Krampus. It was in my nature to punish. With her, maybe I didn’t need to keep the monster inside me locked up.
I knew what kind of books she liked to read. Whenever I saw her reading a new title between lulls at her shop, I went and picked up the book for myself.
Sweet, kind, level-headed Clara, who ran the darling little floral ship in an adorable Christmas town. No one but me knew what a little deviant she was. The kind that liked to be punished—in a certain way a stupid man like Hogan Humphries didn’t have the brain cells to understand. I doubted she ever let Hogan read her books, not when it ran the risk of him thinking she liked his abuse.
But I knew the nuances between the two. Maybe there was a world where I could let the monster inside out to play, where Clara got her punishment for her crime, and a reward for saving herself.
I could give her the kind of punishment she needed, the kind she’d love even as she screamed and squirmed.
My grin turned manic as I watched naughty little Clara begin to clean up her mess.
Hogan was gone.
Now she’d have an even bigger monster to worry about.
Chapter Six
Clara
Iwas in deep reindeer shit. The initial shock that rendered my system numb was wearing off. I’dkilledsomeone. This went way beyond naughty list territory. I was going to prison if I didn’t figure out how to cover up Hogan’s murder.
Luckily, we were out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was going to just happen across this, at least not tonight. I had time to clean up the crime scene. Though, after I’d bleached the shit out of the garage door and scrubbed away every last fleck ofblood and gob of flesh, I was faced with the most difficult task of the coverup: hiding the body.
Hogan’s crumpled form was still in my driveway, and I hadn’t the slightest clue what I could do with it to ensure no one would ever find him again.
How was I supposed to get away with literal murder? Who the fuck did I think I was? One of the heroines in my books?If only. My mind went to one of my favorite heroines in a dark romance I’d read a while back. She had a stalker, and when she found out who it was, she fed his body to the hogs at a hog farm.
I gasped, realization piercing through me like an electric jolt.
