Page 99 of Dark King Daddy

I had dressed for this.

Not for the Pakhan’s wife or for the woman who ran scaffolds and terrified timber suppliers. Not for the woman on the floor in lavender pajamas. I had stood in my closet for eleven minutes and chosen dark silk trousers that moved when I walked and a fitted ivory blouse with a collar I could button or leave open. I had left it open—one button, the hollow of my throat visible. Heels. Minimal jewelry. My hair down, because pulling it up felt like armor and I was done armoring.

I had dressed as a woman who knew what she wanted and intended to say so.

Daniil stood beside the fire. He had changed from the suit he wore during the day. Dark trousers. A charcoal sweater with the sleeves pushed to his forearms. No collar. No tie. No visible symbol of authority. He looked like a man who had also spent eleven minutes choosing what to wear and had arrived at the same conclusion: this was not a performance.

He watched me take in the room.

“Nobody will interrupt us,” he said. “Security has been told that unless someone’s life is in immediate danger, this room does not exist.”

“Phones?”

“Off. Until we’re finished.”

I obliged, turning my handset off, then I crossed the threshold. The floor was old oak, dark with age. My heels marked each step with a small, precise sound against the wood. I stopped beside the empty armchair but did not sit.

Daniil’s eyes moved over me. The silk trousers. The ivory blouse. The open collar. His gaze lingered at my throat for a fraction of a second — long enough for me to feel heat bloom beneath my skin, short enough that a less attentive woman would have missed it.

I was not less attentive.

“Sit, Ksenia.”

I sat. The armchair was deep, the leather warm from the fire. I folded my hands in my lap. The checklist lay on the table between us, visible, patient, waiting to be filled.

Daniil sat across from me. The fire threw warm light across the hard line of his jaw, the pale ice of his eyes. He did not lean back. He did not assume comfort. He sat with his elbows on the arms of the chair and his hands folded and looked at me with the full, unhurried attention of a man who had decided that whatever happened in this room tonight, he would be present for all of it.

“I want to say something before we begin,” he said. “Nothing discussed tonight obligates either of us to proceed. You may leave at any point. I may stop at any point. This conversation is not a contract. It is a conversation about a contract.”

I nodded. My hands were still folded in my lap. Steady. I had made them steady.

“If we talk about what we want and decide not to act on it, that changes nothing between us. The marriage stands. The alliance stands. Tomorrow morning you go to Harbor House and I go to Sokolov House and we are what we were before.”

“And if I stay?”

The question came out quieter than I intended. Not soft—I did not do soft. But the room was so still, and the fire was so warm, and the man across from me was looking at me with such focused attention that the words fell into the silence between us and lay there, exposed.

Daniil held my gaze. His ice-blue eyes did not waver. The fire shifted behind him, a log settling, and the light moved across his face and did not change what I saw there. Certainty. Attention. The particular steadiness of a man who had thought about this moment as many times as I had and had arrived at it with the same mixture of discipline and hunger.

“Then we decide what Daddy means.”

The word landed in my chest.

Daddy.

It was an offer.

I pressed my fingertips against the arm of the chair. The leather was smooth and warm. I felt the heat of the fire on my right side and the cool of the room on my left and the specific, concentrated warmth of wanting spreading through my body from the place where the word had landed.

Daddy.

I had wanted this for years. And not from just anyone, I realized. From him.

I had wanted to kneel for him. To be told to eat. To be praised. To be corrected—sternly corrected. To stop being the woman who fixed everything and become the woman who was held and fed and told what to do by someone she trusted enough to obey.

And now he was sitting across from me with a checklist and a fire and the word between us, and the wanting was so large in my body that I could feel it in my teeth.

“Tell me what it is,” Daniil said. “Not what it’s called. What it is for you.”