Page 91 of Merciless Daddy

That was the only word for it.

She had been crying in my arms hours earlier. Now she dismantled her intended husband’s intelligence system with a cup of hot chocolate near her elbow and no mercy in her voice.

When the briefing ended, Pietro and Angela left for the carriage house. Tonio followed, carrying enough food for an army and complaining nobody respected logistics when they involved sandwiches.

The door closed.

Yelena remained by the table. Morning light caught the loose strands of her hair. She wore black trousers and a cream sweater. No diamonds. No symbols of ownership.

The agreement lay folded in my inside pocket.

“Yelena.”

She looked at me.

“Do you want the agreement active today?”

Her gaze dropped briefly to my pocket, as if she knew where I carried it. “Yes. I thought it was always active.”

“I need the whole answer.”

Color touched her throat. The formidable operator shifted, not vanishing but letting another part step forward.

“Yes, Daddy.”

The title hit me somewhere deep in the chest, and further down, too.

Desire went through me, but something heavier followed it. Responsibility. The knowledge that she had placed a vulnerable thing in my hands and expected me not to close my fist. Daddy did not mean owner.

It meant I ate after she ate. Slept after she slept. Watched the doors so she did not have to. Held every boundary even when she hated me for it.

Gianni was hunting her.

That fact stood behind everything.

I held out my hand.

She came to me and placed hers in it.

“Then breakfast first, little one,” I said. “After that, we go to work.”

She rolled her eyes.

But she followed.

Ilearned her rhythms in pieces. Every morning began with Kiryl. Yelena never told him she worried. She simply demanded evidence that he was alive. Camera on. Sleeves up. Breakfast described. Location confirmed without naming it.

Kiryl submitted with the patience of somebody who understood he was loved and the guilt of somebody beginning to understand the price she had paid for him.

After the call, she worked.

In business she was always Yelena.

Not little one. Not sweetheart. Never good girl as a method of winning an argument.

She sat beside Angela with spreadsheets reflected in her pale eyes and tore holes in every assumption we made.

“You’ve classified that payment as transport,” she told me the second afternoon.