Page 11 of Dark King Daddy

“I’ll have a full report by morning.”

“You’ll bring it to the meeting. Both families need to see what the Voronins are doing.”

A pause.

“You handled it well, Danya.”

The diminutive. He used it rarely. When he did, it carried the weight of something he could not say directly — pride, or its closest approximation in his vocabulary.

“Thank you, Father.”

The line went dead.

I put the phone down. The driver merged onto the expressway. Behind us, Newark disappeared into the dark.

Tomorrow evening. Volna. The Orlovs.

Mikhail Orlov would be there. Anton Orlov would be there.

And Ksenia.

I had met her perhaps two dozen times over the years. Weddings, funerals, New Year celebrations, the formal dinners that Lev and Mikhail used to maintain the fiction that their alliance was built on something warmer than mutual necessity. Each time, I had noticed her the way you notice a change in the weather — not deliberately, not with decision, but with the body’s awareness of something shifting before the mind has named it.

She would be there tomorrow. Standing beside her brother or her father, wearing something polished and individual, watching the room with those hazel-green eyes that seemed to take in more than anyone intended to show. She would be polite. She would be warm. She would notice everything and reveal nothing.

I wanted to see her.

The thought arrived without permission. I pressed it down the way I pressed down every impulse that did not serve the family, the mission, the duty. Wanting was a luxury. Wanting was what I had felt at twenty, when I still believed desire was something I was permitted to own.

But the thought did not leave. It sat beneath my ribs where Lev’s approval had landed earlier, and it pulsed there with a heat that had nothing to do with the fire we had left behind.

Lust, I told myself. Physical attraction. A response to a woman who was beautiful and intelligent and present. Nothing more.

The word felt insufficient. I examined it the way I had examined the empty garage — looking for what had been staged, what had been planted, what was real beneath the surface.

I could not find the line where lust ended and something else began.

I closed my eyes. The vehicle hummed beneath me. Arkady’s bloodied handkerchief dripped onto the floor mat in the back seat. The expressway lights strobed through the windshield, regular as a pulse.

Tomorrow I would see Ksenia Orlova.

I would be the Pakhan’s son. She would be the Pakhan’s daughter. We would discuss freight schedules and Voronin aggression and the survival of two families who needed each other and did not trust each other.

And I would feel whatever I felt, and I would press it down, and I would carry it.

That was the shape of my world.

Chapter 2

Ksenia

Ok. That did not sound good.

Like really, really not good.

That was not a noise that belonged in an 1887 coffee warehouse—a hard, rhythmic hissing from above the second-floor gallery, like a kettle left on a burner in another room. I was standing at the site office window on the ground floor of Harbor House, reviewing the day’s inspection checklist with Luis, when the sound cut through the noise of the renovation.

Then I saw the water.