Page 142 of Dark King Daddy

His hand tightened in my hair. Not pulling. Pressing. The pressure of a man holding something he was afraid to lose.

“Someone I love,” he said.

He did not say my name. He did not need to. The sentence sat in the air between us, and I felt it land. A man admitting, in the quiet of a room where he had held me and spanked me and read me an agreement and folded paper ferns, that he was afraid.

I turned my head. I looked up at him. His ice-blue eyes were dark in the lamplight, and the composure he wore like armor was thin — I could see through it, the way I could see through the repaired mortar at Il Cedro. The structure was intact. The seams were visible.

“I understand why you told Ilya to take me home,” I said. “I understand the impulse. I’m not asking you to stop feeling it.”

“But?”

“But you talk to me. You ask me. You let me choose. Because the fear doesn’t give you the right to decide for me, and you know that, and you proved that today when you changed the instruction.”

He was quiet.

“The thought of losing you frightens me too,” I said.

The words came out simply. I said it the way I said things in Little space. Simply. Just the truth, placed on the table between us.

His hand moved from my hair to my jaw. He held me there for a moment, then leaned down and pressed his forehead against mine.

We stayed like that. Forehead to forehead. His breath on my mouth. My hand on his knee. The reports spread around us, the investigation continuing without us, the yard still burned, the leak still unidentified, the Voronins still out there. All of it outside this room. All of it waiting.

I closed my eyes.

Zoe was right.

I loved my husband. I did.

I loved him.

But I did not say it. Not aloud, not yet.

But I knew. The knowing was enough. It sat inside me the way the signed agreement had sat on the library table — real, present, waiting to be acknowledged.

Daniil’s forehead pressed against mine. The lamp hummed. The house was quiet.

We breathed.

Chapter 13

Daniil

Peace. Blessed peace.

She was still asleep when I woke.

The room was grey with early light. The lamp had burned out sometime during the night—the bulb dark, the amber glow gone, replaced by the flat, cold wash of November morning through the curtains. Ksenia lay on her side facing me, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, the other resting on my chest. Her hair was across the pillow and across my arm and I had not moved because moving would have disturbed it.

I lay still and listened to her breathe.

The house was quiet. No car horns. No phone. No Arkady in the kitchen eating an apple and contributing single-syllable disagreements. Just the heating system clicking through its cycle and the faint tick of the hall clock downstairs and Ksenia’s breathing, slow and even, each exhale warm against my skin through the t-shirt I had slept in.

Love. I felt it.

I was awake now. She was asleep. The words were easier to think in the dark, when she couldn’t see my face, when the admission could exist without requiring a response. In the light, with her eyes open and her attention on me, the same words became something I had to survive saying.

I put my hand over hers. Her fingers were warm. The ring caught the grey light—a small, specific flash of gold against my chest.