Page 87 of Dark King Daddy

Nikita dealt. I picked up my hand and sorted it. Six of clubs. Jack of hearts. Two aces. The cards were worn soft at the edges, familiar in a way that made my fingers relax.

Arkady looked at me across the table.

“Has he scheduled your relaxation yet?”

I looked at Daniil. He did not look up from his plate.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“He schedules relaxation,” Arkady said. “Thirty-minute blocks. Usually between nine and nine-thirty p.m. He treats it like a meeting.”

“It is a meeting,” Nikita said. “A meeting with his own free time. Remember the agenda he made for Christmas lunch?”

“It was a seating chart, not an agenda,” Daniil said.

“It was a spreadsheet.”

“It had two columns.”

“Spreadsheets have columns. That’s what makes them spreadsheets.”

Daniil set down his fork. “Both of you are assigned to warehouse inventory next week. The warehouse next to the sewage works.”

“You can’t assign us to warehouse inventory for telling the truth,” Nikita said.

“Watch me.”

“He does this,” Arkady told me. “Punishes honesty. Rewards silence. It’s a terrible management style.”

“It’s working.”

“Is it?” Arkady gestured at the room. “We’re playing cards in a restaurant where our father was murdered eight days ago. Nothing about this is working.”

The words landed. For a second, the room went still.

Then Kiryl took another dumpling from Daniil’s plate, and Daniil moved the plate closer again, and the stillness broke.

Yelena looked up from her phone. She studied me with her pale grey eyes—the raptor stare that I had learned to recognize as assessment rather than hostility.

“Is he being unbearable?” she asked.

She asked it directly. In front of him. As though Daniil were not sitting three feet away.

I considered the question. Daniil was watching me now, his fork suspended, his expression carrying the faintest edge of something that might have been curiosity or might have been dread.

“I haven’t collected enough evidence,” I said.

Yelena’s mouth curved. Not a smile. The ghost of one. “Fair.”

Nikita began the round. I played conservatively at first, watching the others. Nikita played with visible charm and hidden calculation—discarding low cards while watching everyone’s eyes. Arkady played with brute force, clearing tricks through sheer weight of trumps. Kiryl played badly and cheerfully. Anton played carefully, conserving his high cards.

Daniil played the way he did everything: without waste.

I began to see the patterns. Nikita watched Kiryl’s hands. Kiryl watched his own cards and nothing else. Arkady watched everyone except the person he should have been watching.

By the third round, I had mapped the table.

I led Nikita into a discard sequence that left him holding three low hearts and a king of diamonds he could not protect. He played the king. I took it with the ace. He looked at me with genuine admiration.