Page 154 of Dark King Daddy

I turned my head. I pressed my mouth against her ear.

“I love you.”

The words came out. Finally. After the shower and the dark and the sleeping woman who dreamed about toast. After the library and the agreement and the silk scarf and the spanking and the morning I said you should eat before you call Luis instead of the three words that had been sitting on my tongue for days.

They came out simply. Without weight. Without drama. Three words, spoken against her ear, in the amber light, in our bed.

She was quiet. One second. Two.

Her arms tightened around me. Her face turned into my neck. I felt her mouth move against my skin—lips shaping something, pressing it into me rather than saying it aloud.

Then she pulled back. She looked at me. Her hazel-green eyes were wet. Not grief. Not pain. Something that had been waiting behind everything else—behind the fear and the photographs and the forty-eight-hour deadline and the man in the hotel room who thought he could decide what their marriage looked like.

“I love you,” she said. “I’ve been trying not to. I’ve been explaining it away—adrenaline, proximity, shared trauma, the DDlg dynamic creating dependency that mimics emotional attachment. I had a whole argument. It was very convincing.”

“Was it?”

“No. My friend Zoe asked me if I loved you and I gave her the argument and she said why do you look terrified rather than relieved and I didn’t have an answer.”

“What’s the answer?”

“The answer is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Love, love, love.”

I kissed her. She kissed me back. The tears on her cheeks transferred to my face and I did not wipe them away. They belonged there.

Tonight, there was only this.

Only us.

Chapter 14

Ksenia

Today I woke first. And I did not move.

He slept on his left side—my husband—facing me, one arm tucked under the pillow, the other stretched between us. His hand was open. Palm up. Fingers slightly curled.

I looked at him.

His face in sleep was different. Not softer—Daniil’s face did not do soft. But the composure was gone. The constant, watchful stillness that he wore like a uniform had loosened. His jaw was relaxed. His mouth was slightly open. The line between his eyebrows—the one that appeared whenever he was calculating, deciding, controlling—had smoothed to nothing.

I smiled. I let myself.

His eyes opened.

Not gradually. Not the slow, blinking emergence of someone surfacing from deep sleep. He went from unconscious to alert in less than a second, the way he always did, and his ice-blue eyes found my face immediately.

He saw the smile.

“What,” he said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re smiling.”

“I’m allowed to smile.”

“You’re smiling at me.”