Page 86 of Dark King Daddy

He had not drawn attention to it. He had not announced it. He had done it in a corner, in a low voice, with no audience except a woman who had lost her husband because he had been standing at the wrong stair on the wrong night.

I watched Daniil handle the union rep. Watched the way he listened—fully, without interrupting—and then responded with three sentences that resolved a concern the man had been carrying for a week. The union rep left looking relieved. Grateful. Loyal.

Daniil turned and found me across the room.

Our eyes met.

The restaurant moved around us—voices, glassware, the clink of vodka bottles being opened, the low hum of two organizations learning to share a room. None of it reached the space between us.

He looked at me the way he had looked at me across the dinner table at Volna, before the lights went out. Before the blood. Direct. Unhidden. The composure he wore for everyone else was still there, but beneath it—visible only because I had learned to look—was heat.

I looked away first.

The evening was working. The captains were drinking together. The clients were staying. The alliance looked real because it was being performed convincingly by two people who understood their roles.

The problem was that parts of it were becoming real.

And I did not know which parts.

The public guests left in clusters. Handshakes, nods, the particular shuffle of men who had drunk enough vodka to be friendly but not enough to be careless. When the last union representative cleared the entrance, the restaurant exhaled.

We moved upstairs.

The private lounge on the second floor of Volna occupied a space that had once been a card room. Dark wood paneling. Leather sofas pushed against the walls. A low table already set with food—zakuski, blini, smoked fish, pickled mushrooms, black bread, a plate of potato dumplings dusted with dill. A bottle of vodka stood open beside a pitcher of water.

The room changed the moment the door closed.

Arkady dropped into a chair against the wall and stretched his legs out, his jacket falling open. Nikita shed his coat entirely and rolled his sleeves to the elbow. Kiryl appeared from somewhere—I had not seen him during the public reception—and dropped onto the sofa beside Yelena, who shifted to make room without looking up from her phone.

Sal stood behind Yelena’s sofa, one hand resting on the back near her shoulder. Not touching. Present.

Anton took the chair beside mine. He had loosened his collar. He looked less like a Pakhan and more like my brother—tired, watchful, but allowing himself to exist in a room without performing authority.

Daniil sat at the head of the low table. He accepted a plate from whoever had set the food out and began eating with the methodical efficiency of a man who treated meals as logistical necessities rather than pleasures.

Kiryl reached across and took a dumpling from Daniil’s plate.

Daniil did not look up. He did not comment. He picked up his plate and moved it six inches closer to Kiryl.

The gesture was small. Automatic. The reflex of an older brother who had been feeding a younger one for twenty years.

Something shifted in my chest.

I had spent the evening watching Daniil command a room— he captains, the clients, the union men. I had watched him deliver threats with perfect courtesy and comfort a widow without drawing attention. I had watched him be Pakhan with the precision of a man who understood that the role required everything he had.

This was not the Pakhan.

“Nikita,” Arkady said. “Come on, let’s have some fun! Deal.”

Nikita produced a deck of cards from somewhere—I suspected he carried one the way other men carried weapons—and began shuffling with the practiced ease of someone who had been cheating at cards since adolescence.

“Durak,” he announced. “Standard rules. No table talk.”

“Your table talk is the only thing that makes you tolerable,” Arkady said.

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”