Page 78 of Dark King Daddy

I stripped in the bathroom. I showered until the water turned cold. I dried my hair with the dryer I had packed, not the one Galina had placed in the bathroom for me, because using someone else’s dryer in someone else’s house felt like one concession too many.

I dressed for war.

Black trousers, fitted, high-waisted. A cream silk blouse with a mandarin collar. A structured blazer in dark charcoal. Heels—the black ones with the narrow toe, the ones Zoe called my “don’t fuck with me” shoes. I put on makeup. Foundation. Concealer. A red that was almost brown on my mouth. I swept my hair back and pinned it at the nape.

I looked at myself in the mirror. Polished. Adult. Every seam in place, every button closed, every trace of the woman on the floor with the stuffed rabbit erased.

Then I saw the ring.

A plain band. White gold. It sat on my left hand as though it had always been there, though I had worn it for less than twenty-four hours. I turned my hand. The metal caught the light.

Married.

The word still did not fit. Three days after burying my father, I had stood in the church where Daniil had buried his and let a man I had wanted from a safe distance place a ring on my finger.

I closed my hand around the ring and went downstairs.

The breakfast room occupied the rear of the house, facing the garden. Morning light came through tall windows and fell across a table set for two. Daniil sat at the near end, a cup of coffee in front of him, security reports fanned across the place mat. He wore a dark shirt—charcoal, almost black—with the sleeves rolled to the forearm. His hair was neat. His jaw was clean-shaven. He looked like a man who had slept eight hours and risen without effort.

He was infuriatingly handsome. The fact registered before I could stop it. The line of his shoulders beneath the shirt. The way his forearms rested on the table. The quiet authority in the way he held the report—one hand, steady, reading without urgency.

My husband.

He looked up.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“Did you sleep?”

The question was ordinary. His voice was ordinary. Everything about him was so aggressively, mercilessly ordinary that my hands wanted to shake.

“Yes. Thank you.”

I sat across from him. Galina had set out coffee, toast, butter, jam, sliced fruit. I reached for the coffee and poured it into a cup, adding nothing, holding it between my hands because I needed something to hold.

“I’ve instructed Galina and Pavel that no one enters your suite without your explicit permission,” Daniil said. He turned a page. “That includes me.”

“Thank you.”

“A car will take you to Harbor House at ten. Ilya will accompany you. He’s been briefed on your site protocols.”

“Fine.”

We sat in silence. He read. I drank coffee I could not taste. The garden beyond the windows was still and gray, the last leaves clinging to branches that bent under their own weight.

This went on for four minutes.

He turned another page. He picked up his coffee. He set it down. He did not look at me. He did not glance at my clothes, which screamed competence. He did not search my face for signs of the woman he had seen on the floor.

“Are we going to pretend it didn’t happen?”

The question came out sharper than I intended. The polished, adult version of myself would have waited. Would have measured the moment. Would have found a more elegant way to open the conversation.

The woman who had been caught holding a threadbare rabbit did not have that patience left.

Daniil set down the report. He looked at me. His ice-blue eyes held mine without evasion, without heat, without the particular sharpness that would have given me something to fight against.