Page 152 of Dark King Daddy

She looked up when I came in.

“Is everything set?”

“Everything that can be set tonight.”

“Come here.”

I crossed the room. I stood in front of her. She reached up and took my hand. Her fingers were warm. She held my hand and looked at it—turned it over, examined the knuckles, the lines across the palm, the broad shape of it.

“Sit,” she said.

I sat beside her. The bed dipped under our combined weight. The lamp was on. The amber light fell across her face, her hair, the absurd pajamas.

“Daniil.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want the Voronins deciding what happens to our marriage.”

She said it without emphasis. Plainly. The way she said things when the armor was off and the words came from the place beneath the performance.

“Oleg wanted you to make a decision about me. He wanted you to decide where I go, what I do, how I live. He wanted to turn you into the kind of man who ships his wife away because he’s afraid.”

“I know.”

“But I’m not staying because you told me to. I’m staying because this is my home and you are my husband and I will be damned if Viktor Voronin gets to decide what my life looks like.”

I looked at her. The cartoon cats on her pajamas. The bare feet. The set of her jaw. The woman who had looked at five photographs of herself under surveillance and said what do you want to do instead of tell me what to do.

I kissed her. I put my hand on the back of her neck and I brought my mouth to hers and I kissed her with the full weight of everything I had been carrying since the Meridian Hotel. The fear. The fury.

She kissed me back. Her hands found my collar. She pulled me closer—not urgently, not with the desperation of the night in the library. With intention. With the deliberate, focused attention of a woman who had decided what she wanted and intended to take it.

I pulled back. I looked at her.

She reached for the hem of her pajama top. I stopped her. I took her hands. I held them.

“Let me,” I said.

She let me.

I lifted the top. Slowly. The flannel sliding up over her stomach, her ribs, her breasts. She raised her arms and I drew it over her head and dropped it on the chair. She wore nothing beneath it. Her skin was warm in the lamplight—pale, soft, the faint mark of the pajama seam pressed into her shoulder.

I put my mouth on her shoulder. The seam mark. I kissed it. Then the curve of her collarbone. Then the hollow of her throat, where the gold pendant usually rested. It was on the dresser now. She had taken it off. The hollow was bare.

I kissed her breast. Left first. The swell of it, the softness beneath my mouth. I found her nipple and circled it with my tongue—slowly, with the patience I had not given her the first night, when everything had been hunger and urgency and the raw, explosive release of days of restraint. This was different. This was not hunger. This was devotion.

She inhaled. Her hand came to my head. Her fingers threaded through my hair. She did not pull. She held.

I moved to her right breast. Same patience. Same attention. My mouth warm on her skin, my tongue tracing the shape of her, my teeth grazing the nipple until she made a sound—low, quiet, the sound of a woman settling into pleasure rather than chasing it.

I moved down. Her stomach. The soft skin below her ribs. The place where her hip bones created a shallow valley. I kissed each place. I took my time. The lamp hummed. The house was silent around us—no phone, no car, no Arkady, no crisis. Just the room and the bed and the woman beneath my mouth.

I knelt on the floor. She sat on the edge of the bed. I put my hands on her knees and pushed them apart—gently, not a command, a request. She opened.

I pulled the pajama bottoms down. Over her hips, her thighs, her calves. She lifted her feet so I could draw them off. She was naked. Sitting on the edge of our bed in the amber light, her legs parted, her hands resting on the mattress beside her hips.

I gripped her legs. My hands wrapped around her thighs—both of them, my fingers spanning the flesh, holding her open. I could feel the muscle beneath the softness. The strength in her. She was not fragile. She was not breakable. She was warm and alive and here, in our home, in our bed, and the man who had photographed her was in a hotel room across the city and he could not touch this.