Page 166 of Dark King Daddy

Her voice was flat. Stripped of any warmth. Flirtation and happiness a distant memory.

“He stood next to Anton. He accepted condolences for three hours. People came to my father’s casket and Kostya stood there and accepted their hands and their grief and he —”

She stopped. Her fingers tightened. The knuckles stayed white.

“He bought me my first proper drawing pencils,” she said. “In a wooden case. I told him once that I wanted them, and he remembered. I still have the case.”

I did not say anything. I sat beside her and I let the silence hold what I could not.

“I defended him,” I said.

She turned her head. Her eyes found mine—hazel-green, dry, fixed.

“When the false schedule pointed at his circle,” I said. “When Nikita brought the list and I saw his name among the six recipients. I told Anton that Kostya was cautious, not treacherous. I said it with certainty. I said it as though I knew.”

“You believed it.”

“I believed it. He was Mikhail’s brother-in-law. He had been part of the Orlov organization for twenty years. I looked at his name on that list and I constructed an explanation that let me keep trusting him, and the explanation was wrong.”

“Did you want him to be innocent?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Did you need him to be?”

I considered the question. It was precise, the way Ksenia’s questions were—aimed at the seam she had already identified.

“Partially,” I said. “If Kostya was clean, the leak was an accident. A careless subordinate, a stolen document, a single compromised man inside his circle. If Kostya was dirty, the rot went to the center. The family. The trust. The alliance itself. I wanted the problem to be smaller than it is.”

“It isn’t.”

“No.”

She looked at the phone on the shelf. The dark screen. The silence that had replaced Nikita’s voice.

“He helped them kill my father,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And then he stood at the funeral and mourned.”

“Yes.”

Her hands unlaced. She pressed her palms flat against her knees. The gesture was deliberate—a woman forcing her own hands still.

“It’s a bad business, Little One. A hard world. A world where power and money sometimes matter more to men than blood. It shouldn’t be this way, but it has always been this way.”

I reached for her hand. I took it. She let me.

Her fingers were cold.

“I can’t explain it,” I said. “I can’t tell you why a man who was family for twenty years decided that the alliance and the organization and the people who trusted him were worth less than whatever Viktor offered.”

“There is no explanation,” she said. “It’s just . . . people.”

The candles in the dining room flickered. One of them guttered and recovered. The light shifted—shadows moving across the wall behind us, a brief rearrangement of the room’s geometry that settled again.

The next words were difficult. “You can’t stay here,” I said.