Page 75 of Dark King Daddy

I knocked.

Two seconds of silence. The music continued.

“Come in.”

I opened the door.

The sitting room was small, and the lamp beside the armchair filled it with warm, low light. The curtains were drawn. A tray sat on the side table — dinner, untouched. Grilled chicken, rice, vegetables. Galina had prepared it. Ksenia had not touched it.

Ksenia sat on the floor.

Not in the armchair. On the rug, beside the low coffee table, wrapped in a yellow wool blanket that I did not recognize. It must have come from her apartment. It smelled faintly of cedar and someone else’s laundry detergent.

She wore faded lavender pajamas and thick striped socks—pink and cream.

Her hair was down. Loose. Falling over her shoulders and across the blanket.

And tucked against her chest, held in the crook of one arm, was a grey rabbit.

Threadbare at the ears. One button eye replaced with a felt circle. Worn soft by years of being held exactly this way.

The miniature greenhouse was spread across the coffee table. Tiny wooden walls, window frames, flower pots with paper stems. She had been assembling it. She had stopped. The pieces lay where she had left them, glue still wet on one wall, tweezers resting beside an open tube of adhesive.

On the television screen, a cartoon played at low volume. A girl on a broomstick. A black cat. A town by the sea.

Ksenia looked up at me.

For one second, she was simply there. Present. Unguarded. Her face open in a way I had never seen it — no composure, no assessment, no careful management of what she allowed the world to see.

Then the door registered.

Her expression changed. Fast. A sequence of movements I watched happen in real time — her eyes widening, her arms tightening around the rabbit, her shoulders drawing up as though she could make herself smaller.

She shoved the rabbit under the blanket.

“I was just — I couldn’t sleep, so I —”

Her voice had changed. The polished warmth was gone. What remained was thinner. Simpler. The sentences started and stopped, the structure of someone whose verbal armor had been removed and could not be reassembled fast enough.

“It’s fine,” she said. “You don’t have to — I’m fine.”

I did not move from the doorway.

I had seen this before.

Not with Ksenia. With Yelena, in Chicago, in the weeks after she escaped Lev’s arrangement with Gianni. Sal had described it to me in the careful, limited language of a man who understood that what he was telling me was not his to tell fully. The coloring books. The blanket nests. The particular softness that entered Yelena’s voice when the armor came off and the woman who ran cold-storage empires became someone who needed to be told it was time to eat.

I recognized the lavender pajamas. The striped socks. The rabbit held against the chest. The cartoon playing at low volume. The project that required nothing from anyone except the person doing it.

I recognized Little space.

I stayed where I was.

“Ksenia.”

She looked at me. The blanket was pulled up to her chin now, hiding the rabbit, hiding the pajamas, hiding everything she could hide. Her hazel-green eyes were wide and bright and terrified.

“Are you Little right now?”