Page 128 of Dark King Daddy

“And if nobody moves?”

“Then we wait. Or we try again with a different setup.” He shrugged. “But Viktor has been aggressive. He’ll move on something soon. The bait is good. I think the hungry fucker will take it.”

I looked at Ksenia. She was studying Nikita’s tablet, her head tilted, reading something on the screen.

“The cargo number is real?” she asked.

“Real number. Real manifest. Fake location.” Nikita smiled. “Everything looks legitimate until you try to find the container.”

She nodded. Professional approval. The assessment of someone who understood logistics well enough to recognize competent work.

“Good,” I said. “Keep me posted.”

Nikita pocketed the tablet and disappeared back toward the dining room, where Arkady was still eating bread.

The car was quiet. Ilya drove without instruction—Dover Street, the route memorized. Ksenia sat beside me, her coat folded on her lap, her heels off. She had slipped them off in the car, a small act of release that she performed without thinking, and her bare feet rested on the floor mat.

“Thank you,” I said. “For tonight. Kostya.”

“You handled it.”

“We handled it. You had the numbers before he finished asking the question.”

She looked out the window. The streetlights of Brighton Beach slid past, casting amber bands across her face.

“I enjoyed being beside you tonight,” she said. “Not managing. Not accommodating. Just . . . beside you. As a unit.”

It was the same feeling as when she said “we.” The same quiet claim of partnership.

“Daniil.”

“Yes.”

“I want something tonight.”

Her voice had shifted. Not the polished register of the dinner table. Not the simpler voice of Little space. Something between—direct, adult, carrying the particular weight of a woman about to ask for something specific.

“Tell me.”

“A game. When we get home. A private game.” She turned from the window. Her hazel-green eyes found mine in the dark interior of the car. “I want to challenge your authority. Deliberately. I want to break a rule we agree on and I want you to respond.”

“You want to be corrected.”

“I want to earn it. Not through neglect—not skipping a meal or staying up too late. Through choice. I want to choose to disobey and I want to feel the consequence of that choice.”

The car turned onto Dover Street. The row houses appeared, dark and uniform, our porch light the only one burning.

“And I want it to be playful,” she said. “Not heavy. Not punishment for something real. A game with rules and a known outcome and the pleasure of playing it.”

I parked the thought. Held it. Turned it over.

“We discuss it in the library,” I said. “Before anything happens.”

“Agreed.”

The library was warm. The armchairs sat where they had sat the night of the agreement. The leather folder was gone, filed in the study upstairs. The checklist was in a drawer. What remained was the room itself: dark oak, old leather, the particular quiet of a space designed for conversation.

Ksenia stood beside the table. She had taken off her coat. The green dress caught the lamplight. She looked at me with the focused attention of a woman entering a negotiation she intended to win.