Page 88 of Dark King Daddy

“Where did you learn to play?”

“My father’s kitchen. Every Sunday.”

“Mikhail played dirty?”

“Mikhail played to win. There’s no such thing as dirty in cards.”

Kiryl was struggling. Six cards in his hand, no trumps, two low clubs that would not survive the next round. I caught his eye. He looked desperate.

I discarded a low spade. Kiryl took the trick. I discarded another. Kiryl took it again.

He was building a hand. Slowly. Card by card.

Arkady did not notice. He was focused on Nikita, who was feeding him a false narrative about his trump holdings through the specific cadence of his discards.

The trap closed on the seventh trick.

Kiryl laid down three cards in sequence. Arkady looked at his hand. Looked at the table. Looked at Kiryl.

Six cards.

Arkady was holding six cards with no way to defend them.

“How?” Arkady asked.

Kiryl grinned. It was the grin of a twenty-year-old who had just outmaneuvered a man who frightened criminals for a living.

“Must be luck,” he said. Everyone laughed.

I picked up my tea and drank it.

Daniil looked at the table. He looked at Kiryl. He looked at me.

His eyes shone.

I stared at him.

The attraction hit me like a physical force. Not the slow burn of the evening—the sharp, sudden recognition that I wanted this man. Not the Pakhan with his authority and his security reports and his ice-blue eyes. This man. The one who moved plates and laughed at card games and scheduled relaxation in thirty-minute blocks.

I wanted him. I had wanted him for years from a distance that made the wanting safe. The distance was gone. I was sitting across a table from him, wearing his ring, and he was laughing, and I could not look away.

He caught me staring.

The laugh faded. What replaced it was not the composure of the Pakhan. It was something rawer. His eyes held mine across the table, and the heat I had seen downstairs—the heat he had not denied—was there, unguarded, visible.

I looked down at my cards.

The game continued. Arkady recovered from his humiliation by playing with renewed aggression and eliminating Nikita in two rounds. Nikita accepted his defeat with the grace of a man who had already begun planning his revenge.

At eleven-fifteen, Daniil set down his cards.

“It’s late,” he said. He looked at me. “We should—”

“Ask your wife.”

Yelena’s voice cut across the table. She did not look up from her phone. She said it with the flat authority of a woman who had spent her life being told what to do by men who assumed they had the right.

Daniil stopped.