Page 141 of Dark King Daddy

The question arrived without preparation. No lead-in, no careful framing.

I picked up my cold coffee. I put it down.

“It would be premature to call it that,” I said. “We married because of the alliance. Because my father and his father were killed and the organizations needed to be held together. The circumstances are—they’re not ordinary. Everything has happened quickly. The intensity of the situation—the danger, the investigation, the proximity—it accelerates things. Feelings that would normally develop over months are developing over days because we’re living through a crisis together. That’s not love. That’s adrenaline and proximity and shared trauma and the particular bonding that happens when two people are under extraordinary pressure.”

I paused. I had more. I could feel the explanation continuing, building, each clause a brick in a wall I was constructing between myself and the question.

“And the DDlg dynamic complicates it further. The structure he provides, the care it creates dependency that mimics emotional attachment. I need to be careful not to confuse the relief of being cared for with the deeper—”

“Ksenia.”

I stopped.

Zoe let the silence hold. She did not rush. She sat with her chin on her hand and her brown eyes on my face and she waited until the machinery of my explanation had fully wound down.

“If you’ve explained it all away,” she said, “why do you look terrified rather than relieved?”

I looked at my coffee. The surface was still. Cold. The lemon rind from the cake sat on the plate beside it, curled and dry.

I had no convincing answer.

After coffee, I stayed at Zoe’s studio until late afternoon. Dover Street was dark when Ilya pulled up. The porch light burned—the only one on the block, the same small beacon that had been lit every night since I moved in. I climbed the steps with Boris behind me and let myself in.

The hallway was quiet. Galina had left dinner on the stove—covered pots, the smell of something with dill—and a note on the counter that said simply: Reheat. Eat. I did not reheat. I went to the library.

The door was open. The lamp was on. Daniil sat in the armchair—the same armchair where he had spanked me, where he had read the agreement—and the surface around him was covered with the work he had neglected. Folders. His laptop. A tablet showing camera feeds from Maspeth. Nikita’s intelligence reports, now creased at the corners from handling. The dispatch revisions, finally unsigned no longer—his pen sat on top of them, the ink still wet on the last page.

He looked up.

The day had aged him. Dark circles beneath his eyes. A tightness in his jaw that had not been there when we lay in bed last night talking about seating arrangements.

He held out his hand.

I crossed the room. I took it. I sat on the floor beside his chair, my back against the armrest, my shoulder against his leg. He did not pull me into his lap. He held my hand and rested his other palm on my head, his fingers in my hair, and we stayed like that for a moment without speaking.

“Anything from Nikita?” I asked.

“He and Anton are running the records. Phone logs, financials, movement reports for all six recipients. It takes time. No reason yet to accuse a particular man.”

“Roman Belov?”

“Nothing yet. Clean phone records. No unusual financial activity. He’s either innocent or careful.”

“Both are possible.”

“Both are very possible.”

His fingers moved through my hair. Slow. The motion was absent, habitual—a man thinking with his hands while his mind worked through something heavier.

“The call,” he said.

I waited.

“The call about Maspeth. At 2:47.” He paused. His fingers stilled. “Fourteen men were inside that shed. Fourteen men were working a night shift because the schedule required it, and someone poured accelerant on the building around them, and if Yuri hadn’t smelled it—”

He stopped. I felt the tension in his hand. Not gripping — holding. Holding still.

“I keep thinking about the phone,” he said. “The sound of it. The way it cut through the room. And I keep thinking—the next call. The next time the phone rings at three in the morning. What it will be about. Who it will be about.”