Page 145 of Dark King Daddy

“You’re not always. You’re careful when it suits you.”

I crossed the room and put my hand on the back of her neck. I tilted her face toward mine.

“I’ll be careful today,” I said. “It suits me.”

I kissed her. She kissed me back.

The Meridian Hotel occupied a corner of Atlantic Avenue that had been gentrifying slowly for a decade. The facade was restored brownstone—original ironwork, repointed mortar, the kind of careful preservation that told you the owner had money and wanted you to know it was old money. A doorman in a gray overcoat held the entrance. He looked at me, looked at Nikita, and stepped aside without speaking.

Nikita walked beside me through the lobby. His tablet was in his jacket, his phone in his hand. He had briefed me in the car: the Meridian was owned through a holding company registered in Delaware. The private dining room on the second floor seated twelve. Two exits—the main door and a service corridor that led to a stairwell at the rear. The hotel had no known Voronin ownership connection, which meant Viktor had chosen neutral ground deliberately.

“He wants this to look like a conversation,” Nikita said. “Not a summons.”

“Bullshit. It’s a summons.”

“Yes. But a polite one.”

Arkady stood at the base of the stairs. He did not look pleased. His hands were in his coat pockets and his jaw was set in the particular configuration that meant he had already identified every structural weakness in the building and was calculating the cost of using them.

“Second floor,” I said. “Private dining room. Stay at the stairs. I want the service exit covered.”

“Who’s covering it?”

“Hotel security is Voronin’s. We’re using Boris.”

“Boris is at the car.”

“I moved him. Nikita arranged it.”

Nikita produced his phone and showed Arkady the position. Boris was already inside the hotel, seated in the lobby café with a newspaper and a coffee and a shoulder holster beneath his jacket.

Arkady looked at the phone. Looked at Nikita. Looked at me.

“If this goes wrong,” he said, “I’m coming through the wall.”

“Noted,” I said.

I went up the stairs.

The private dining room was at the end of a narrow corridor on the second floor. The door was open. The room inside was long and low-ceilinged, with a single table set for four. White linen. Candles. A bottle of something on the sideboard, unopened. The curtains were drawn. The overhead lights were off. The only illumination came from the candles and the thin grey light that leaked through the curtain gaps.

Oleg Voronin sat at the far end of the table.

I had seen photographs. I had read Nikita’s file. I had studied the man on paper—his measurements, his history, his methods, his known associations. None of it had prepared me for the physical fact of him.

He was enormous. Not tall in the way of a man who had been tall his whole life and carried it loosely. Large in the way of someone who had built mass deliberately and maintained it with discipline. His shoulders strained the seams of a charcoal suit that fit badly because no off-the-rack garment was designed for that architecture. The collar was open. The shirt beneath was white. A heavy watch sat on his left wrist, the face of it catching candlelight.

His face was what the file had described but what photographs had softened. The broken nose, never properly reset, gave the center of his face a crooked set that made his symmetry unsettling rather than attractive. The scar through his right eyebrow divided it into two unequal halves. His hair was cropped so short the scalp showed through. His eyes were pale blue—very pale, almost colorless in the candlelight—and they found me the moment I entered the room and did not leave.

He smiled.

“Daniil Sokolov.” He stood. The chair scraped against the floor. He extended his hand. “Thank you for coming. Please, sit. Can I get you something? The hotel has a very good bourbon. I opened a bottle.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re fine.” He repeated it the way someone repeats a word they find amusing. He sat back down. His hands rested on the table—large hands, the knuckles marked, the skin across them roughened. “Nikita. Good to see you. The third brother isn’t with you today?”

Nikita sat to my left. He did not respond to the question. His face held the smooth, pleasant expression he used when he was collecting information.