Page 121 of Dark King Daddy

“You’re asking about the foundation.”

“I’m asking about your foundation. The one you’d build this project on.”

I set down the pen. The sketch sat between us on the back of the receipt—the arched window, the tile pattern, the worn steps. My handwriting was cramped from drawing too fast. There were ink smudges on my fingers.

“You would need to underpin,” I said. “Sequential. Section by section. You’d excavate beneath the existing footings and pour new concrete in stages, never more than a meter at a time, to prevent any shift in the load-bearing walls. Then you’d install a perimeter drain to redirect the groundwater away from the foundation.”

“And the tiles?”

“Conservator. We would need a specialist. You lift them individually, number them, document the pattern, clean them with a pH-neutral solution, repair the substrate, and relay them in the original configuration.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot.”

“I’ve thought about this for four years.”

He held my gaze. The candle flickered between us. The panna cotta sat untouched.

“What would you do?” I asked. “If nobody had a claim on your time.”

The question landed differently. I felt it the moment the words left my mouth—the shift in the air between us, the way his shoulders adjusted, the fractional pause before he spoke.

He looked at the candle. The flame reflected in his eyes—two small points of light in the pale blue.

“I prepared to be Pakhan before I considered whether I wanted it,” he said. “The preparation started when I was sixteen. Father decided I would inherit. Not because of my skill or my temprament, you understand. Just because I was eldest. The decision was made. My role was to be ready.”

He paused. The server approached, saw the expression on Daniil’s face, and redirected toward another table.

“By the time I asked myself whether I wanted it, the question was irrelevant. I was thirty. I spoke the language. I knew the routes, the captains, the accounts, the alliances. I was the only person who could do it. Wanting didn’t enter the equation.”

“That’s not an answer,” I said quietly.

“No.” He looked at me. “It’s the explanation for why I don’t have one.”

“You can’t even imagine it?”

“No. To be me is to be this person. I can’t separate myself from the duty. We are one and the same.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then:

“Dover Street. The house. That was mine. One of the few choices I made because I wanted to, not because someone needed me to.”

“Why that house?”

“I could hear the sea from the garden.”

I reached across the table. I took his hand. Not the way he had taken mine—I covered his palm, pressed my fingers over his knuckles, held him the way you hold something you’ve just been given that you know is fragile.

The server brought the check. Daniil paid without looking at it. I put my coat on and he held the collar and his fingers brushed the bare skin of my back and neither of us mentioned it.

We walked to the car. Columbia Street was quiet—the bodega was closing, the print shop was dark, the streetlamps threw long pools of amber across the pavement. Ilya stood by the car, his back to us, giving us the particular privacy of a man who was paid to be invisible.

I stopped on the sidewalk.

“Was tonight another one?” I asked. “Like Dover Street. A choice you made because you wanted to.”

Daniil stopped. He turned to face me. The streetlamp caught half his face and left the other half in shadow.

“Every part of it,” he said. “And not just the night. You. Us. The way our relationship is changing—growing. It’s what I want.”