Page 74 of Dark King Daddy

“Nobody enters your suite without your permission,” I said. “Not Galina. Not Pavel. Not me.”

She held the keys in her palm. Five keys on a plain ring. She looked at them for a long moment.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll be in the study if you need anything.”

“I won’t need anything.”

She said it without edge. Without challenge. A simple statement of fact from a woman who had spent the day being married, photographed, and delivered to a stranger’s house, and who needed the door to close behind her more than she needed anything else.

I understood. She was strong.

I showed her the suite. She walked through it once—the bedroom with its pale blue curtains, the bathroom with the deep tub, the small sitting room with its bookshelf and armchair and the window that faced the garden. Her belongings had been placed on the bed. Two suitcases. A cardboard box.

She did not unpack. She looked at me.

“I’d like to be alone.”

“Of course.”

I left. The door closed between us, and I stood in the corridor for a moment, listening to the silence that followed.

Then I went to the study and poured myself two fingers of vodka and sat in the dark and drank it and thought about nothing at all.

“Here’s to married life,” I said, making a toast of my hollow misery.

The hours passed slowly.

Galina left at nine. Pavel took his position at the front door. The house settled into the particular quiet of a building that had absorbed the sound of the ocean for decades — a low, constant hum beneath the silence, the water moving two blocks away, patient and indifferent.

I could not sleep.

I lay on top of the covers in my own room, still dressed, and stared at the ceiling. The weight of the day pressed against my chest. The ceremony. Anton’s hand placing Ksenia’s in mine. The crowns. The photograph on the church steps. The drive to Dover Street in silence, Ksenia looking out the window at streets she did not know, her ivory dress folded on the seat between us.

I thought about Lev’s office. About the chair that did not fit. About the fountain pen I had not moved.

I thought about Mikhail Orlov’s last word. Together.

I thought about Ksenia’s hand in mine at the altar, and the single tremor that had moved through her fingers, and the way she had steadied when I held tighter.

The fact we hadn’t kissed.

At one-fifteen, I got up.

I went downstairs for water. The kitchen was dark. I did not turn on the light.

As I passed the east corridor, I saw it.

Light beneath the sitting-room door.

Faint. Warm. The particular amber glow of a lamp rather than an overhead fixture.

And sound. Soft. A melody I recognized after a moment—strings, gentle, the opening of an animated film. The notes were barely audible through the door, as though the volume had been kept deliberately low.

I stopped.

I should have continued to the kitchen. Should have taken my water and returned to my room and respected the boundary she had set. She had asked to be alone. I had agreed. The agreement was clear.