Page 3 of Dark King Daddy

“What else did Karpov say?”

“He said — he said the Sokolovs wouldn’t need the waterfront much longer. He said when things changed, the people who helped early would be remembered.”

Nikita made a sound. Quiet. Almost inaudible. I knew him well enough to recognize contempt compressed into a single exhale.

I stood. I picked up the burner phone from the table and turned it over in my hands. The screen was cracked but functional. I would give it to Nikita for analysis.

“Yuri.”

He looked up.

“You will go home tonight. You will tell no one about this room, this conversation, or the fact that we caught you. You fell. Hurt your lip at work. Tomorrow you will go to work as normal. If Karpov contacts you again, you will come to me. Not to Arkady. To me. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

I cut the zip ties. He rubbed his wrists. He did not stand. He sat in the metal chair and held the water bottle with both hands and looked at me as though I had pulled him out of a river.

I walked past Arkady to the door. Nikita peeled himself off the wall and followed.

“Clean him up before he leaves,” I said to Arkady without turning around. “And find out where Denis Markov lives. I want someone on his building by tonight.”

Arkady’s footsteps followed me into the corridor. “You’re going soft. Soft as old fruit.”

“I’m going to Father,” I said. “Get the brother covered. Then come upstairs.”

The door closed behind me. I climbed the stairs toward the upper floors, toward the coffee and wood polish and Lev’s tobacco, carrying the shape of something I could not yet see whole.

The old arrangement is finished.

I needed to understand what that meant before my father did.

My father’s office occupied the northeast corner of the third floor. Tall windows looked out over Brighton Beach Avenue, and from his desk he could watch the street, the boardwalk, and the water. He had chosen that room years ago, before I was born, and nothing in it had changed since. The desk was oak, heavy enough that two men could not move it without lifting. The chair behind it was leather, dark, cracked at the armrests where his hands had worn through the finish. Photographs lined one wall — the family in frames, Sokolov House in another, a black-and-white print of a village outside Volgograd that I had never heard him discuss.

The room smelled of his cologne and cigars. Even with the window cracked, the scent had soaked into the curtains, the carpet, the wood. I sometimes wondered if it would remain after he was gone.

He sat behind the desk when we entered. He had not been waiting — Lev never waited — but he had been informed, and he had decided this required his attention. That alone told me how seriously he took it.

Arkady stood to my left. Nikita to my right. We did not sit. Father had not offered.

I told him. Yuri Markov. Relief dispatcher. Caught copying protected schedules onto a burner phone. Split lip, courtesy of Arkady. Twenty-six years old, a brother named Denis, nineteen, gambling debts exploited by the Voronins.

I told him about Boris Karpov. The specific request for Orlov cargo. The repeated phrase.

Lev listened without interrupting. His hands rested flat on the desk. His eyes moved between the three of us, measuring what we brought him. Arkady brought the fact of violence — the split lip, the zip ties, the readiness to do more. Nikita brought assessment — the political shape of the problem, the implications for the alliance. I brought the plan.

“Yuri stays in place,” I said. “We move Denis somewhere safe tonight. We feed Karpov false schedules through Yuri — routes that look real, timelines that match our actual patterns closely enough to seem genuine but diverge at the critical points. When Karpov acts on the false information, we trace who else he contacts. We identify the full network of compromised employees before they know we’ve found one.”

Lev’s gaze stayed on me.

“It gives us the map,” I said. “Not just one node. The whole structure.”

Nikita spoke from my right. “It also gives us deniability. If we move quietly, the Voronins don’t know we’ve found their pipeline. We keep the advantage of surprise.”

“And if we kill Karpov tonight,” Arkady said, “the Voronins know we’ve found their pipeline, and they lose their recruiter. The advantage of surprise is that they’re dead.”

“Dead men don’t talk,” Nikita said.

“Neither do live men who are afraid,” I said.