Page 116 of Dark King Daddy

The words were quiet. Not a command. Not a negotiation.

I stayed.

I sat on the edge of the bed. I pulled off my sweater and dropped it on the chair beside the nightstand. I was in a t-shirt beneath it. She watched me. I did not perform the undressing. I did not make it a gesture. I simply removed a layer because I intended to stay, and staying meant settling, and settling meant the sweater came off.

I reached for her. She came. She sat beside me on the bed, her hip against mine, and I put my arm around her and drew her against my shoulder. Her head found the place beneath my chin. Her hair fell across my arm. Misha was within reach — she pulled him from the pillow and held him in her lap, one hand on the rabbit, one hand on my knee.

I kissed her again. Not the kiss of the sofa—slower, softer, the kind of kiss that said I am here and I am not leaving and the wanting will keep. She kissed me back with the same patience, and when it ended she pressed her forehead against my jaw and breathed.

The lamp glowed. The house was quiet.

I held her. The night settled around us, and I recognized—privately, without speaking, without naming it to her or to myself—that the hopes I carried had already traveled far beyond the agreement in the leather folder downstairs.

The agreement was structure. Rules. Consent. Discipline.

What I felt was not in the blueprints.

I pressed my mouth to her hair. She turned her face into my neck.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

She closed her eyes. I did not. I lay beside her in the amber light and listened to her breathing slow and held her and thought about tomorrow and the day after that and the particular, terrifying shape of wanting something I had not planned for.

Chapter 10

Ksenia

Iwoke with my hand between my legs and Daniil’s name in my mouth.

The room was dark. The pillow smelled faintly of his cologne, something warm and cedar-dark that had transferred from his neck while I slept against him. He was gone. The mattress beside me held the faint depression of where he’d been, but the sheets were cool.

The dream was still inside me. Not fading the way dreams usually do—pulling apart at the edges, dissolving into fragments I couldn’t quite hold. This one stayed. Specific. Visceral. His hand in my hair, pulling my head back, his mouth on my throat. His cock driving into me with a force that made the bed shake against the wall. I could still feel the ghost of it—the fullness, the stretch, the relentless rhythm he’d set and that I’d had no control over.

I had come. In my sleep, in the dark, in the bed where he’d held me without touching me, my body had taken over and I’d climaxed so hard I’d bitten through the pillowcase to keep from crying out. My jaw ached from the pressure. Between my legs I was wet—still wet, the orgasm hadn’t fully released the tension, it had only sharpened it.

The part that made me press my face into the pillow.

In the dream, he’d turned me over. His hands on my hips, lifting. His mouth against my ear, low and rough, telling me he was going to take my ass. And I’d wanted it. Not politely, not curiously—desperately. The wanting had been so fierce it had frightened me even inside the dream. I’d said yes. I’d pushed back against him. He’d—

I squeezed my eyes shut. My face burned in the dark.

I was a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a graduate degree and a professional practice and I was lying in a damp patch on my own sheets, blushing about a dream. A dream in which my husband—my husband, who had sat on my bed fully clothed and kissed me goodnight and left without touching me—had fucked me in ways I hadn’t even put on the checklist.

I hadn’t put it on the checklist because I hadn’t been ready to admit I wanted it.

I lay there for another minute. Then I got up, stripped the sheets, and put them in the hamper. I showered. The water did nothing to settle the low, persistent ache that the dream had left behind.

I dressed for work. Black trousers. A fitted blouse in pale grey. My hair up. Normal. Not the clothes of a sexually desperate freak. I went downstairs.

Voices from the kitchen. Daniil’s—low, measured, the cadence I now recognized as his operational voice. Nikita’s, lighter, faster, carrying the edge of a complaint. Arkady’s, a rumble beneath both, contributing what sounded like a single-syllable disagreement.

I heard something, Nikita’s voice. “The joint loads are moving through Maspeth on schedule,” Nikita said. “No refusals.” Then, I entered the kitchen.

Daniil stood at the counter with a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. Nikita sat at the island with a tablet. Arkady leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded, eating an apple.

All three looked up.