Page 151 of Dark King Daddy

“The fifth photograph,” I said. “The wide shot. From the end of the block. Dover Street. Our house. Our porch light. Our guard on the corner.”

She understood. I watched her understand—the shift in her expression, the way her eyes moved to the window and back.

“They’re already watching the house,” she said.

“Confinement doesn’t solve it. If they can photograph our front door, they can reach our front door. Keeping you inside doesn’t make you safe. It makes you stationary.”

“What do you want to do?”

I looked at my hands. The white knuckles. The tension I had been carrying since the Meridian Hotel, since Oleg’s smile, since the first photograph.

“I would give up being Pakhan,” I said. “If I believed it would genuinely keep you safe. I would step down. I would hand over the operation. I would take you out of this city and never come back. If I believed Viktor’s promise was worth the paper it wasn’t written on.”

She held my gaze.

“Why should we trust a promise from the people who killed our fathers?”

The question sat between us. I had no answer. She had not expected one.

Viktor had murdered Lev and Mikhail. He had burned Maspeth. He had photographed my wife. And now his son sat in a hotel room and offered me safety in exchange for surrender, as if the word of a man who killed fathers could be trusted to protect a wife.

“We involve Anton,” I said. “Everything. The photographs. The terms. Kostya’s call. Anton needs to know that someone in his organization is passing information to the people who are trying to destroy us.”

“And Kostya.”

“Nikita traces the timeline. When he first contacted Viktor. What he knew and when he knew it. If Kostya is compromised, Anton needs to find out from us, not from the Voronins.”

She nodded. Then she stood. She crossed the room. She sat on the arm of my chair—not in my lap, not on the floor beside me. On the arm. Close enough that her hip pressed against my shoulder.

“I’ll call Luis tonight,” she said. “He can supervise the site work tomorrow. I’ll work from here. The Henry Street assessment doesn’t need me on-site.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’m choosing to. Not because you told me to. Because the photographs tell me that moving around the city right now is stupid, and I’m not stupid.”

I reached for her. My hand found her waist. I drew her from the arm of the chair into my lap, and she came, and I held her against my chest with both arms and pressed my face into her hair.

She held me back.

Her arms went around my neck. Her hands gripped the back of my shirt. She held me the way I was holding her—tight, close, with the particular grip of someone who understood that the person in their arms was frightened.

I was frightened.

I let her feel it. The tension in my shoulders. The pressure of my arms around her. The way my face pressed into her hair and did not lift. I had been holding it since the hotel—the fury, the fear, the image of her face in the first photograph, smiling, unaware—and I had carried it through the car and the highway and the phone call and the hallway, and now I let it exist in my body where she could feel it.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I held her. The lamp hummed. The house was quiet. The photographs lay on the hall table where she had placed them, and the porch light burned outside, and the man at the end of the block was Boris, and Boris was watching the street, and the street was empty.

“I’ll call Nikita, put things in place. Then . . . we can just be.”

Ifinished the call with Nikita at nine-fifteen. He would begin tracing Kostya’s communications immediately. Anton would be briefed in the morning. Arkady was doubling the watch on Dover Street. Boris was staying overnight.

The house was locked. The guards were positioned. The work that could be done tonight had been done.

I went upstairs.

Ksenia was in my bedroom. She had changed—the grey sweater gone, replaced by one of her “interesting” pajama selections. Flannel. Patterned with small cartoon cats. She had pulled back the covers on the bed and placed Misha on the nightstand and she was sitting on the edge of the mattress with her bare feet on the floor and her hands in her lap.