Page 20 of Dark King Daddy

I walked down the corridor toward the stairs, my heels clicking on the old floorboards. Behind me, the door to my father’s office closed.

Tomorrow. Volna. Seven o’clock.

Daniil would be there. He would stand at his father’s right hand. He would watch the room. He would present the Sokolov analysis with precise numbers and a voice that carried without being raised.

And I would stand beside my father, polished and useful and composed, and Daniil would look past me exactly as he always had.

I drove home with the radio off and the windows down and the November air cold enough to feel in my fingers.

*

I locked the door at eighty-two Pioneer Street and stood in the dark for a moment.

The apartment was small. A one-bedroom in a converted warehouse three blocks from the water, with exposed brick, original beams, and a radiator that clanked like a prisoner dragging chains. I had bought it five years ago with my own money — not Orlov money, not Bratva money, but the money I had earned restoring buildings for people who had no idea what my father did for a living. The mortgage was in my name. The deed was in my name. The only person with a spare key was Zoe.

This was mine.

I dropped my bag on the floor by the door. I kicked off my shoes and they landed on their sides near the shoe rack I never used.

I stood in the hallway and let the day fall off me.

The pipe. The ceiling. The inspector. Sergei’s face, swollen and broken, his voice cracking on his wife’s name. My father’s hand around mine. I need you beside me, Ksyusha. The drive home with the windows down and the cold air on my fingers and the radio off.

I went to the bedroom. I changed.

The pajamas were lavender. Soft cotton, faded from washing, the elastic in the waistband stretched enough that they sat low on my hips. The socks were striped — pink and cream, thick, the kind that made my feet look slightly ridiculous. I had bought them at a drugstore two years ago and had never worn them outside this apartment.

I went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. Macaroni and cheese. From a box. The kind with the powdered cheese that turned the color of something unnatural and tasted like comfort in a chemical formulation. I ate it standing at the counter, out of the pot, with a wooden spoon.

No plate. No table. No performance.

I rinsed the pot. I left it in the sink.

In the living room, I pulled the yellow blanket off the back of the sofa and wrapped it around my shoulders. It was wool, heavy, slightly pilled at the edges. I had found it at a flea market on Atlantic Avenue. It smelled faintly of cedar and the previous owner’s laundry detergent, which I had never been able to fully wash out. I didn’t want to. It smelled like someone else’s home, and sometimes that was enough.

I collected my rabbit from the bedroom. His name was Misha. I had named him when I was nine, after my father, which my father had found either touching or alarming and had never specified which. Misha the rabbit was grey, threadbare at the ears, missing one button eye that I had replaced with a felt circle glued on with fabric adhesive. He sat on my lap while I arranged the blanket around my legs.

I put on Kiki’s Delivery Service. The opening notes filled the apartment — soft, warm, the particular gentleness of a story about a girl who was still learning what she could do. I had watched it perhaps forty times. I did not need to watch it. I needed it to be on.

On the coffee table, I had set out the miniature greenhouse kit. It was a model — a tiny Victorian conservatory, no bigger than a shoebox, with pre-cut wooden pieces and paper foliage and a set of instructions translated from Chinese into English by someone who had clearly never assembled a model in their life. I had bought it online three weeks ago. It had arrived on Tuesday. I had not opened it until now.

I sorted the pieces. I laid them out on the table in rows — walls, roof panels, window frames, tiny flower pots, strips of paper printed with leaf patterns. I found the glue. I found the tweezers. I found the magnifying glass I used for fine detail work on restoration drawings, repurposed now for gluing paper leaves to wire stems.

The first piece was the base. Four walls joined at the corners, the seams aligned, the glue applied with a toothpick because the kit had not included an applicator and I had learned from experience that too much glue warped the wood. I held the walls in position for thirty seconds while the adhesive set.

The second piece was the floor. I slotted it into the base and checked the fit. Tight. Good.

The third piece was a window frame. I picked it up with the tweezers, applied glue to the edge, and placed it against the wall. It was three-eighths of an inch tall. My hands were steady. They had been steady all day — through the pipe, through the ceiling, through Sergei’s broken face and my father’s careful request. They were steady now because they were doing something that mattered to no one except me.

That was the point.

Little space did not make me a different person.

I knew that. I had spent years being afraid it did — afraid that the part of me that wanted stuffed rabbits and striped socks and macaroni from a box was the real me, and the woman in leather boots who analyzed Voronin traps and managed building inspectors was the costume. I had been afraid that if anyone saw the pajamas and the blanket nest and the cartoon playing on the television, they would understand something fundamental about me that I had not chosen to reveal.

It took me a long time to understand that the truth was simpler. Little space was not a different person. It was me without the armor. Me without the anticipation, the accommodation, the constant calculation of what everyone else needed and how I could provide it. It was the version of myself that existed when I stopped being useful and simply existed.

The relief of it was enormous. The loneliness of it was, too.