Page 1 of Dark King Daddy

Chapter 1

Daniil

Arkady texted me two words: Come down.

When Arkady sends a message that short, he has already decided the situation requires action and not explanation. That meant I was about to inherit a problem.

I took the service stairs at the back of Sokolov House. The upper floors smelled of coffee, wood polish, and the particular tobacco my father, Lev favored — the scent of authority soaking into everything it touched. Below ground level, the building changed. Concrete walls. Fluorescent tubes behind wire cages. The air cooled and picked up diesel and metal from the old storage rooms. My shoes found grit on the stairs.

The security room occupied the end of the corridor. The door was steel, painted grey, unmarked. I opened it without knocking.

Yuri Markov sat zip-tied to a metal chair in the center of the room. Twenty-six. Relief dispatcher at the Maspeth yard, one of our properties. I had seen him perhaps a dozen times in passing — slight, dark-haired, the kind of young man who kept his head down and his timesheets clean. His lip was split and still bleeding slightly. A phone sat on the table beside him, its screen cracked where someone had slammed it down.

My brother Arkady stood over him with his fists half-curled and his weight forward on the balls of his feet. He had removed his jacket. His knuckles were marked. Clearly,he wanted to continue.

Nikita leaned against the far wall with his arms folded, watching. His suit was still buttoned. He looked like a man at a gallery, studying a painting he already almost completely understood.

“Back,” I said to Arkady.

Arkady’s jaw worked. He looked at Yuri the way a dog looks at a bone it has been told to leave.

“Back,” I repeated.

He stepped away. Two paces.

“This scum,” Arkady spat, “was found copying protected freight schedules on this burner phone.” There was venom in his words. I understood why. This was betrayal.

I pulled the second chair from the corner and placed it across from Yuri. I sat. I did not look at the phone yet. I looked at Yuri.

His eyes were wet. His breathing was fast and shallow. He had been crying, though he was trying to stop. The split lip had swollen on the left side, distorting his mouth. His wrists were raw where the zip ties bit.

But he was not watching me.

He was watching the clock on the wall.

I let thirty seconds pass. I counted them in my head while I studied the rest of him. Cheap shoes, scuffed at the toe. Work shirt with the Sokolov Freight logo — our logo — stitched on the chest. A watch that had stopped — dead battery, no replacement. A man who could not afford to replace his own watch had been copying protected freight schedules onto a burner phone. Interesting.

I stood, picked up the bottle of water sitting on the supply shelf, and placed it in front of him, then untwisted the cap.

“Drink.”

He stared at it. Then at me. Then at the clock.

“Drink first. Then we talk.”

He drank. Water ran down his chin and mixed with the blood from his lip. He coughed, swallowed, and set the bottle down with both hands because his fingers were shaking.

“You keep checking the time,” I said.

His gaze snapped to me. Back to the clock. Back to me.

“I don’t—“

“Yuri.”

He closed his mouth.

“Who are you worried about?”