Page 150 of Dark King Daddy

“I’m coming home. Twenty minutes.”

“Daniil.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t drive like a man who’s panicking. Drive like a man who’s coming home.”

She was standing in the hallway when I came through the door. She had been waiting since the call.

I closed the door behind me. Boris locked it. The sound of the deadbolt was loud in the quiet house.

I took the envelope from my jacket. I held it out.

She took it. She opened it. She pulled out the photographs.

Her hands were steady. She looked at the first one—herself, stepping onto the sidewalk outside The Glasshouse, the oversized coat around her shoulders. She studied it for three seconds. Then she looked at the second photograph. Her profile in the car. The third. Boris. The fourth. Dover Street. The fifth. The wide shot from the end of the block.

She laid them on the hall table. One beside the other. Five images from Monday.

“Tell me everything,” she said.

We went to the library. I sat in the armchair. She sat across from me. The lamp was on—the same amber light, the same room where we had signed the agreement, where I had spanked her, where we had pressed our foreheads together and breathed.

I gave her Oleg’s terms, then told her about the call from Kostya. He had urged me to consider the offer and send her out of the city.

“Kostya.”

“Kostya. He knew the terms, Ksyusha. I had not told him. Anton had not told him. The meeting with Oleg happened less than an hour before the call.”

She was quiet. Her eyes moved to the photographs on the hall table, visible through the open library door.

“The false schedule,” she said. “The one that led to the fire. That was the version distributed to his circle.”

“Yes.”

“And now he’s advising you to accept Viktor’s terms.”

“Yes.”

“You think he’s working with the Voronins.”

“I think he knew something he should not have known. I think Nikita is tracing the timeline now. I think—” I stopped. I pressed my hands together. The knuckles were white. “My first instinct, when I saw those photographs, was to call you and tell you not to leave this house.”

She looked at me. Waited.

“I wanted to say: you are not going anywhere. You are staying inside. I am locking the doors and you are not leaving until I say you can.”

“I know.”

“You know.”

“You would have called and said exactly that. And I would have told you that you don’t get to arrange my life without speaking to me. And we would have had the argument. And you would have been right about the danger and I would have been right about the method.”

“Yes.”

“And then you would have changed the instruction. Because that’s what you do.”

I looked at her. The hazel-green eyes. The set of her mouth. The woman who had stood in this hallway and waited for me to come home because she had heard the car and known that whatever I was bringing back was heavy.