The Billionaire’s Twins Asked Santa for Me

Tessa’s POV

The car hit the ice and my world tilted sideways.

I felt it before I understood it. The back end swinging loose, the steering wheel spinning under my hands like it had disconnected from the road entirely, and then my body slamming against the door as the passenger side crunched into a snowbank hard enough to crack something under the hood.

The engine choked. Sputtered. Died.

Silence. Just my breathing, ragged and animal, fogging the windshield in short desperate bursts. The headlights flickered once and went dark. The wipers froze mid-sweep, caked in ice, and the storm closed in around the car like a fist.

I sat there gripping the wheel with both hands, knuckles bone-white, heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth. The temperature gauge on the dashboard, the last thing still glowing, read negative fourteen degrees.

I turned the key. Nothing. Again. The engine didn't even try.

"No." My voice came out cracked. Barely human. "No, no, no."

My phone sat in the cupholder. Dead. No signal since the last switchback, and now the screen was black, reflecting my own face back at me like a stranger. Hollow eyes. Blue lips. A woman who had driven into a mountain blizzard with $412 to her name and no one who knew exactly where she was.

This was what running looked like. Not brave. Not cinematic. Just stupid and cold and alone on a road that didn't show up on any map.

Three months ago, I had a career. A firm I co-founded. Clients who trusted me with their biggest events, their weddings, their galas. Then Marcus stole the biggest one. Took the client, took the credit, and when I confronted him, he took the narrative too. Told everyone I was unstable. Emotional. Difficult to work with.

The firm removed my name from the website two weeks later. Quietly, like surgery.

The restraining order came after the voicemails. After he showed up at my apartment building at one in the morning, buzzing every unit until someone let him in. Twice.

Ruby thought this trip was a reset. "A quiet Christmas somewhere pretty," I'd told her. I didn't tell her about the voicemails. Didn't tell her Marcus had found out where I was staying before I changed the locks. Didn't tell her that "reset" was the word I used because "running for my life" would have made her call the police, and the police had already told me there wasn't much they could do.

The cold was inside the car now. Not creeping. Invading. I could feel it in my bones, in my jaw, in the spaces between my ribs. My fingers were going stiff. Five minutes, maybe ten, and I wouldn't be able to move them at all.

I looked up through the cracked windshield.

A light. Faint and yellow, bleeding through the trees on the ridge above me. Not a streetlight. Too warm, too steady. A house. A big one, from the spread of the glow.

The rational part of my brain did the math. Forty-degree windchill. No heat. No phone. County-wide travel advisory, which meant no one was coming down this road tonight. Maybe not tomorrow either.

I could sit here and wait. Or I could climb.

I grabbed my bag, shoved the car door open against the wind, and the cold hit me like a physical assault. It stole the air from my lungs, flash-froze the moisture in my nose, and turned every exposed inch of skin into a scream.

The snow swallowed me to the knees on the first step. Each one after that was a war. Pulling one leg free, sinking the other, the wind shoving me sideways while the cold worked its way through my coat, my jeans, my boots, my skin. My fingers stopped hurting somewhere around the twentieth step. That wasn't a good sign. That was the sign that comes right before things stop working permanently.

I kept my eyes on the light and climbed.

Don't look at the dark. Don't think about the fact that no one knows you're here. Don't think about the fact that if you fall right now, if your legs give out and you go face-first into this snow, they might not find your body until spring.

My lungs were on fire by the time the ground leveled out and the trees fell away and the house materialized in front of me like a hallucination.

Massive. Stone and timber and glass, three stories of architecture that didn't whisper money, it screamed it. A fortress built into the mountainside, warm light pouring from every window, and a front door that looked like it weighed more than my car.

I climbed the porch steps on legs I couldn't feel and hammered on the door with a fist I couldn't close. The sound was pathetic. Muffled by the wind, by my frozen gloves, by the sheer thickness of the wood. I hit harder. Harder. Again.

The door swung open and heat hit my face like walking into a wall.

The man standing in the doorway was tall. That registered first, because I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes. Dark hair, sharp jaw, and an expression so cold it nearly matched the temperature outside. His gaze swept over me, head to boots, cataloging the ice in my hair, the blue in my lips, the bag clutched to my chest like a shield.

He didn't step aside. Didn't ask if I was hurt.

"This is private property."

His voice was low and flat. No alarm. No concern. Like I was a stray dog that had wandered onto his porch and he was deciding whether to call animal control.

I tried to speak. Tried to say something coherent about my car, the crash, the storm, the dead engine, the fourteen below. What came out was a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, broken apart by the cold and the shaking I couldn't control.

He started to close the door.

Not a slam. Worse than a slam. A slow, deliberate push. The kind of gesture that says you're not worth the energy of anger. You're just an inconvenience to be sealed out.

Something inside me caught fire. Past the cold. Past the fear. Past the three months of being pushed out of rooms by men who didn't think I belonged in them.

I shoved my boot into the gap before it closed.

"Then call the sheriff," I said through chattering teeth, "and explain why you let a woman freeze to death on your porch."