Page 109 of Dark King Daddy

Maksim had converted the operations room into something closer to an interview suite. Two chairs faced each other across the central table. The wall monitors displayed route maps and harbor feeds. A recorder sat between the chairs, small and black, its red light steady.

He took Ksenia first.

I waited in Anton’s office down the hall. His desk held a brass lamp, a calendar stopped at the week of his death, and a photograph of Ksenia and Anton as children. She was perhaps eight in the picture. Dark curls. Missing tooth. Anton stood behind her with both hands on her shoulders, grinning at the camera with the unguarded joy of a boy who had not yet inherited anything.

I studied the photograph for longer than I should have. Then I read the overnight reports on my phone and waited.

Twenty minutes. Maksim brought Ksenia back. She looked composed. Her face gave nothing away. She sat in the chair outside Anton’s office and pulled out her phone and began working through a list of calls.

My turn.

Maksim’s questions were methodical. He walked me through the evening of the assassinations chronologically—my arrival at Volna, my movements between floors, my knowledge of the meeting between Lev and Mikhail, my awareness of the security code distribution. I answered each one directly. He recorded everything. His dark eyes stayed on my face, watchful and patient, and I understood that his thoroughness was not suspicion. It was the same thoroughness I had demanded when I said investigate all six names.

When we finished, Maksim turned off the recorder. “I’ll have a transcript by tomorrow. Anton wants to review both accounts together.”

“Good.”

I left the operations room and found Ksenia at a desk in the administrative office. She had taken over the space—papers spread across the desk, her phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, a pen in her right hand, making notes on a printed invoice.

I stood in the doorway and watched.

She was confirming her father’s memorial inscription with someone—a stonemason, from the vocabulary. She spelled Mikhail’s patronymic. She confirmed the dates. She asked about the font, the stone color, the mounting bracket. Her voice was steady and precise and carried no tremor.

She hung up. She dialed again. A different voice—the funeral director. She questioned the invoice line by line. The casket upgrade that had not been authorized. The floral arrangement charged at retail rather than wholesale. The transportation fee that appeared twice. She found four hundred dollars in overcharges without raising her voice.

She hung up. Dialed again.

This had to be a freight client. One of the Orlov captains had referred him. His container had cleared customs and was sitting on a Sokolov truck and he wanted reassurance that the route was safe after the Hamilton Avenue attack. Ksenia gave him the revised security protocols. She gave him the convoy schedule. She gave him the name of the Sokolov dispatcher who would handle his cargo.

I heard the muffled sounds as he congratulated her on the marriage.

I watched her face. The smile that appeared was warm and genuine and cost her something. She thanked him. She accepted his condolences for Mikhail. She promised to have Anton call him personally by end of day. She hung up.

She set the phone on the desk. She reached beneath the desk with her left hand and began turning the ring on her finger. Around and around. The white gold caught the fluorescent light, flashing small bright signals against the underside of the desk where no one could see.

She looked exhausted, emotional. It was so much to deal with. She needed me, but she didn’t know it yet. Time to help her see.

I crossed the room, stopping beside her chair.

“Let’s take an hour. Have a break. It’s hard.”

She looked up. Her hand stilled on the ring.

“There’s a car outside. Ilya can drive us. One hour. No calls. No paperwork. Just . . . us.”

She looked at the papers on the desk. The phone. The invoice with her blue-pen annotations. The list of remaining calls in her handwriting, six names not yet crossed off.

“I don’t know.”

“Kostya can handle the rest,” I suggested.

“But—”

“No buts, young lady.”

She locked eyes with me, and for a moment I thought she might argue. But she didn’t. Instead, we went to find Kostya near the operations room door. He was lookign tired, harrowed. He had done since the murder. Still, when Ksenia handed him the paperwork with brief, clear instructions, he took it without question, then kissed her cheek.

We found Ilya outside. “The Glasshouse. Van Brunt Street.”