Page 136 of Dark King Daddy

I followed, then stopped. This was his. These were his workers, his yard, his responsibility. I stood six feet back and watched.

He reached the men. He did not raise his voice. He spoke to the nearest one—a broad man in a high-visibility vest, soot on his neck—and the man pointed toward a figure sitting alone on a concrete bollard.

It was Yuri.

The dispatcher was thin. The kind of thin that came from skipping meals during long shifts. He wore a Sokolov Freight jacket with the collar turned up, and he held a paper cup of coffee that didn’t look warm. His hands were shaking. Not dramatically—a fine, persistent tremor visible in the way the cup rattled against the bollard.

I watched Daniil crouch beside him, bringing himself to Yuri’s level. He spoke. Yuri answered. Daniil listened. Then he stood and turned to the rest of the crew.

I moved closer. Close enough to hear.

“Your wages continue while the yard is closed,” Daniil said. “Full pay. No deductions. The yard shuts down for investigation, not for layoffs.”

Nobody spoke. The words settled over the group. One of the men with the oxygen mask pulled it down to his chin and nodded.

“Yuri pulled the alarm,” Daniil said. “Fourteen of you are standing here because of him.”

Yuri looked at his coffee cup. He did not acknowledge the statement. He turned the cup in his hands, the tremor visible in the rotation.

I stepped forward.

“Yuri.”

He looked up. His eyes were bloodshot. The smoke had irritated them, or he had been crying, or both.

“Thank you,” I said. “For the men. For the alarm.”

He blinked at me. Then he said, “What about the loaders? The ones on the east shift? They don’t start until six. They’ll hear the yard is closed and think—”

“The east shift will be notified directly,” I said. “They’ll know their jobs are secure before they hear anything else.”

He nodded. The answer had been what he needed.

Daniil moved through the group. He spoke to each cluster of men, asking about injuries, confirming contact information, giving instructions. He was quieter than he had been at dinner. The dry humor was gone. The composure remained, but it had shifted. It was the composure of a man who understood that these men’s lives were his responsibility and that the responsibility had nearly killed them.

I stood beside the fire truck and watched the sky lighten behind the yard’s chain-link perimeter. Pink and grey. The floodlights were still on, but the natural light was beginning to compete with them, and in the mixed illumination the damage to Shed C looked worse—more permanent, more real.

Daniil returned to me. He stood beside me and looked at the shed. The collapsed roof. The buckled doors.

“I should have been paying more attention,” he said.

His voice was flat. Not self-pitying. The tone of a man cataloguing a failure.

“You were investigating your father’s murder,” I said.

“I was in bed with my wife for four days.”

I did not flinch from it. He was right.

“We don’t know yet whether anything you neglected contributed to this,” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound harsh, but I worried that’s how it came out.

“We don’t know that it didn’t.”

I did not apologize, but I knew we had work to do.

“We find out who leaked the schedule,” I said. “We fix the yard. We go back to work.”

He looked at me. The ice-blue eyes were tired. Dark circles beneath them. He had not slept, and before the phone call he had been lying awake in the amber light thinking about tomorrow and the day after that and the shape of wanting something he had not planned for.