Page 158 of Dark King Daddy

A simple question.

“Yes.”

No hesitation.

Anton studied my face. His eyes moved across it the way they had moved across the photographs — systematically, looking for the thing that would tell him whether what he was seeing was real.

“I love him,” I said.

The words landed on the kitchen table between the cold eggs and the face-down photographs. Anton’s hands went still on his coffee cup.

“You love him?”

“I tried not to. Couldn’t help it.”

Anton’s mouth moved. Not a smile. Something more complicated—the expression of a man confronting a feeling he had not expected to feel.

“I’ve been carrying this,” he said. “The marriage. The agreement. Watching you walk into it because the alliance needed it, because Papa was dead and the organizations needed holding together. I let you choose—I know you chose—but I’ve been carrying the weight of what that choice cost you.”

“I know you have.”

“I kept thinking—if I had been stronger. If I had been more prepared. If I had been the kind of Pakhan who didn’t need his sister to—”

“Anton.”

He stopped.

“You can put that down,” I said. “That particular worry. I chose him. I chose the marriage. And then I chose him again—not the alliance, not the Pakhan, him. Daniil. You don’t get to carry guilt for something I’d choose again tomorrow.”

Anton looked at me. His eyes were bright. He blinked twice. He picked up his coffee cup and drank, and the drinking was a cover for whatever his face was doing behind the rim.

“You’re sure?” he asked. Setting the cup down. Composed again.

“I’m sure.”

“He’s lucky to have you, dear sister.”

“He’d say the same thing. He’d say it with less emotional range, but he’d say it.”

Anton almost laughed. The sound got halfway out before he caught it and turned it into a cough, and I loved my brother in that moment — loved him for the cough, for the almost-laugh, for the guilt he had carried and was now, tentatively, setting down on the kitchen table beside the cold eggs.

The spare bedroom smelled like paint and dust.

It was the smallest room on the second floor—barely ten by twelve, with a single window facing the street and a radiator that clanked when it woke up. Daniil had been using it as storage. Three boxes of Lev’s old files. A broken lamp. A very uncomfortable chair.

I had taken the room for a work call because Daniil was in the library with Nikita’s files, and the kitchen table had the worst lighting I had encountered in a residential building. I had tried to review drawings there this morning and had ended up squinting at my own handwriting, wondering whether I had specified a load-bearing partition or written a recipe for borscht.

The call was with Luis. Henry Street. It seemed kind of perverse that I had to just keep working, despite the threats and the danger. But also, I was glad of it. It felt normal, and normal felt safe. The client had approved the revised floor plans, and Luis needed my sign-off on the material samples before Tuesday. I sat on the floor—the chair was non-negotiable, I would rather sit on hardwood—with my back against the wall and the drawings spread around me like fallen leaves.

“The pine is wrong,” I told Luis. “The grain is too tight. It’ll look like plastic from six feet. Go with the oak. Same budget, better finish.”

“Oak it is. Anything else?”

“Send me the window spec again. The sash weight calculation looked off. I think the contractor used the wrong multiplier.”

“Will do. Boss—how are you? We haven’t seen you.”

“I’m fine, Luis. Send the specs.”