Page 133 of Dark King Daddy

“We’re learning a lot about our bodies today,” I said.

I held her. I pressed my mouth against her hair. My jaw was wet with her, and I could smell her on my skin, and the scent of her was so deeply embedded in my senses that I felt marked by it. Claimed. She had come on my tongue twice, and the second time she had made a sound that I would carry with me for the rest of my life.

I was happy. I was simply, stupidly, completely happy. Lying in my bed with my wife’s face against my chest and her hand in my shirt and the lamp casting amber light across the room.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she shifted, propped her chin on my chest, and looked at me.

“Should we have the next family dinner here? At Dover Street?”

I looked at her. The question was ordinary. The kind of question a wife asks a husband about their home. Where to put people, what to feed them, how to arrange a table.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like that.”

“Galina could cook. Or we could do it ourselves—you made the soup last time. The grilled cheese.”

“The soup was better than the grilled cheese.”

“I burned one side. The other side was perfect.”

I laughed. The sound surprised me. It came from the same place her moan had come from—somewhere beneath the architecture of who I was supposed to be.

“Arkady would sit at the end,” she said. “He likes the corner. He can see the doors.”

“Nikita beside him. They argue less when they’re next to each other.”

“Yelena across from you. Anton beside me. Kiryl—” She paused. “Will Kiryl come?”

“If I invite him. He’s been avoiding family gatherings.”

“He’s twenty. They all avoid family gatherings at twenty.”

“What about you at twenty?”

“I was restoring a brownstone in Park Slope and dating a trombonist who thought he was the next Coltrane.”

“Did he play like Coltrane?”

“Ha! No.”

I laughed again. She smiled. The smile was slow and warm and entirely present.

We talked about the table. The chairs. Whether Anton would bring wine or whether Nikita would insist on selecting it. Whether Galina would make pelmeni or whether Ksenia would attempt something she’d seen in a cookbook. The conversation had no weight. No stakes. No security implications, no alliance calculations, no consideration of who might be offended by the seating arrangement.

It was the most important conversation I had ever had.

We were making plans for our home. Not the Pakhan’s house. Not the safe house. Not the strategic asset on Dover Street. Our home. The place where we ate and slept and fought and fucked and held each other through nightmares and laughed about burned grilled cheese.

She fell asleep first. Her breathing slowed against my chest. Her hand loosened in my shirt. I lay in the amber light and listened to her and thought: tomorrow. Tomorrow I will tell her. Tomorrow I will say the words and she will hear them and the words will be true and she will know.

I closed my eyes.

The phone rang at 2:47 a.m.

The sound cut through the bedroom like a blade. I was awake instantly—the particular, instantaneous alertness of a man who had spent his adult life expecting phone calls in the dark. Ksenia stirred but did not wake.

I picked up the phone. Arkady.

“Talk,” I said.