Page 125 of Dark King Daddy

My phone held fourteen unread messages from Arkady. Nikita had left two folders on my desk, both untouched. The Maspeth dispatch revisions sat unsigned. I had moved them twice—once to make room for Ksenia’s coffee, once to make room for her hips—and read them zero times.

The irony was not lost on me. I controlled a criminal organization spanning three boroughs. I could order men to violence, negotiate with hostile syndicates, and manage a freight network worth millions. I could not tell my wife—the woman I was married to—that I loved her.

I had managed it once, while she was sleeping. I pressed my mouth against her hair and whispered it, barely audible, and she stirred and mumbled something about toast. I had confessed to a woman who was unconscious and dreaming about breakfast.

Tonight would be different. Tonight we had obligations.

Volna. The first formal family dinner since the assassinations.

I stood in my bedroom pulling on a charcoal shirt and watched Ksenia at the mirror. She wore dark green—a dress that fitted close through the bodice and fell straight from the hip. Her hair was down. She was putting on earrings, small gold loops, and her fingers were steady on the clasps.

“What should I expect tonight?” she asked.

Her eyes met mine in the mirror. The question was practical. She was preparing.

“Kostya has concerns,” I said. “He’s been pressing Anton about the shared shipments. Thinks the families are becoming too dependent on each other.”

“Dependent how?”

“The arrangement. Orlov cargo clears the waterfront and moves through our yard at Maspeth. Our drivers collect it and deliver it along Sokolov routes. Both families earn from each shipment. Kostya thinks Anton is giving us too much control over Orlov product.”

Ksenia set down the earring. She turned from the mirror.

“Is he right?”

“The arrangement was Mikhail’s. And Lev’s. It predates us. The structure works.”

“But Kostya doesn’t trust the structure.”

“Kostya doesn’t trust that Anton can maintain it. He thinks a new Pakhan should renegotiate from a position of distance, not partnership.”

“And you disagree.”

“I think the partnership is what keeps both families alive right now.”

She studied me for a moment. Then she picked up the necklace from the dresser—a thin gold chain with a small pendant — and held it out.

“Help me with this?”

I took the chain. She turned her back to me and lifted her hair. The nape of her neck was bare. The green dress left her shoulders mostly covered, but the collar sat low enough that I could see the top of her spine.

I fastened the clasp. The chain settled against her skin, the pendant resting in the hollow above her collarbone. I did not move my hands away. My fingers rested on the chain, on the warmth of her neck, and I leaned forward and pressed my mouth against the spot where the hair ended.

She smelled like something clean and faintly warm. Vanilla, maybe. Or just her.

“We can handle Kostya together,” she said.

We.

The word sat in the air between us. She had said it without emphasis, without deliberation, as though it were simply true. As though the two of us were a unit that could walk into a room full of Orlov and Sokolov captains and manage a difficult conversation. As though that was obvious.

I wanted to tell her. The sentence was there again, pressing against the inside of my ribs, filling my mouth. I could feel the shape of it—three words, simple, direct, the kind of thing a man should be able to say to the woman he’d married and slept beside and held through nightmares and fucked until neither of them could breathe.

I kissed her shoulder instead. One more press of my mouth against the green fabric, against the warmth beneath it.

“You look beautiful,” I said.

She turned. Her hazel-green eyes moved across my face, and I thought — not for the first time — that she could see things I didn’t intend to show. She looked at me the way she looked at the windows at the Glasshouse: with an architect’s attention to what was original, what was repaired, what was failing beneath the surface.