Page 101 of Dark King Daddy

Daniil reached for the leather folder. He opened it. Inside was a document—typed, structured, the same clean legal language that had characterized our marriage agreement. He had drafted this before I arrived. He had been preparing.

“The standing rules,” he said. “What do you want?”

I looked at the blank section on my page. I had thought about this for hours. In the shower. In the car. In the eleven minutes of choosing silk trousers.

“Three proper meals,” I said. “Not coffee. Not granola bars. Actual food, three times a day. If I skip a meal, I want you to notice and address it.”

He wrote.

“Bed by midnight on work nights. Unless we’ve discussed it. If I’m working past midnight on a project, I want you to tell me to stop.”

He wrote.

“Honest disclosure. If I’m sick, if I’m injured, if I’m overwhelmed and pretending I’m not—I want you to require the truth. I want to not be allowed to perform ‘fine’ when I’m not fine.”

He wrote. Then he set the pen down.

“Three rules,” he said.

“Three.”

He looked at me. His ice-blue eyes held mine across the table, across the fire, across the careful architecture we were constructing between us.

“We begin with only three. Structure should support you, Ksyusha. Not surround you until you can’t move.”

Ksyusha.

The name went through me. My hands, which had been steady in my lap. Ksenia was what he called me. Ksenia Orlova. Formal, precise, the name of a political wife. Ksyusha was what my father called me. What Anton called me. What Zoe called me when she was worried.

Ksyusha was the name for someone loved.

I pressed my fingertips into the leather arm of the chair. The warmth of the fire was on my skin. The word was in my chest.

“Three rules,” I said. “Agreed.”

“Now we talk about discipline,” Daniil said.

He said plainly, without ceremony, as though the word did not carry the weight I felt it carry. As though it were simply the next item on a list, which perhaps, for him, it was.

For me it was not.

I had rehearsed this part less. The meals, the midnight, the honest disclosure—those were practical. Those were self-care with a framework. Discipline was something else. Discipline was asking a man to correct me when I failed, and wanting him to.

I looked at the fire.

“I want consequences,” I said. “Consequences that remove the exhausting possibility of bargaining with myself.”

Daniil waited.

I forced myself to continue. “When I skip a meal, I tell myself I’ll eat later. When I work past midnight, I tell myself the project needs one more hour. When I’m overwhelmed, I tell myself I’m handling it. I am an excellent self-negotiator, Daniil. I can talk myself out of anything, including caring for myself. I want—”

I stopped. My fingers pressed into the arm of the chair hard enough that I felt the leather grain against my nails.

“I want to be put over your knee. I want to be made to state the rule I broke. I want to be spanked firmly enough that the consequence feels real. Not brutal. Not cruel. Real. Something I remember the next time I reach for a granola bar instead of a meal and tell myself it’s adequate.”

The room held my words. The fire shifted. A log cracked and sent a shower of sparks against the grate.

Daniil did not respond immediately. He sat with his hands folded and his eyes on mine and let the silence do what silence does — hold the weight of what had been said without rushing to resolve it.