Page 6 of Dark King Daddy

“She calls every morning,” Kiryl said. “She asks what I ate. She asks if I slept. She asks if I’m warm enough, as though I’m not an adult living in a city with central heating.”

“She loves you,” I said.

“I know. It’s exhausting.”

The door opened again.

Lev entered without knocking. He had changed his shirt since the meeting — a fresh white one, collar buttoned. He moved to the head of the table and stood there, not sitting, looking at Kiryl.

“Starting Saturday,” Lev said, “you will spend the day at Maspeth. Learning dispatch. Grigory will show you the system.”

Kiryl went still.

“Every Sokolov son needs a purpose,” Lev continued. “You’ve had your university time. Now you begin learning what the family does.”

The room temperature dropped. Not literally. But the air between Lev and Kiryl contracted, and I watched my youngest brother’s face close the way a door closes — slowly, deliberately, with the latch turning from the inside.

I spoke. “Kiryl is already occupied this Saturday.”

Lev looked at me. Then at Kiryl. Then back at me.

“With what?”

“His coursework. He has a project due.”

Kiryl looked at me. I did not look at him.

Lev studied us both. Whatever he saw, he chose not to press. He turned and left the way he had come — without ceremony, without closing the door.

The room exhaled.

Arkady returned to his chicken. Nikita poured more water. Kiryl stood by the sideboard with the charger in his hand and his face arranged into something carefully neutral.

“What am I doing Saturday?” Kiryl asked.

“Whatever you had planned.”

“I had a study group. That’s it. That’s all I had.”

“Then go to your study group.”

He looked at me for a long moment. The pale eyes — our mother’s eyes, in all of us, though in Kiryl they carried a warmth that the rest of us had learned to bank.

“What did you want at twenty?” he asked.

I put my fork down.

The question should have been simple. I had been twenty once. I had wanted things. I must have wanted things. But the years between twenty and now had been filled with Lev’s preparation, Lev’s expectations, the slow narrowing of my horizon until everything I wanted had been replaced by everything I was required to be.

I looked at my brother. He stood in his university hoodie with a laptop charger in his hand, still young enough that the question was genuine. He was not asking rhetorically. He was asking because he wanted to know whether the man sitting across from him — the heir, the one who carried the weight — had once been a person with desires that did not come from their father.

I could not answer him.

I picked up my fork. I ate a piece of chicken. I looked at the assignments on the table beside my plate.

“Go to your study group,” I said again.

Kiryl watched me for another few seconds. Then he nodded, put the charger in his backpack, and left.