Page 156 of Dark King Daddy

“I love you, Daniil Sokolov. I love you and I like your stupid face and I like being married to you and I like that you folded a paper cactus for my greenhouse and I like that you made terrible grilled cheese and I—”

The alarm went off.

The sound cut through the bedroom—his phone, on the nightstand, buzzing and chiming with the indifferent efficiency of a device that did not care about declarations of love. Daniil’s hand moved from my hip to the nightstand. He picked up the phone. He silenced it. He looked at the screen.

Then he looked at the screen again.

His expression changed. Not dramatically. The smile didn’t vanish. It simply compressed into something harder, thinner, a line of compressed displeasure directed at the time displayed on a phone screen.

“Anton,” he said. “Nine o’clock.”

The resentment on his face was so naked, so unguarded, so completely unlike the controlled Pakhan who had faced Oleg Voronin across a candlelit table—I laughed. The sound came from deep in my chest, unedited, and I pressed my face into his shoulder and laughed until my ribs ached.

“You look like someone stole your birthday,” I said.

“Someone stole my morning.”

“Anton is your ally.”

“Anton is my ally at nine o’clock. At seven-fifteen, Anton is nuisance.”

I was still laughing. I could feel his chest vibrating—not quite a laugh, but the architecture of one, held in place by decades of discipline and the particular Sokolov inability to fully commit to joy without first assessing its tactical implications.

“We should get up,” I said.

“We should.” He did not move.

“Daniil.”

“I’m savoring my resentment. Give me a moment.”

I pushed myself up on one elbow. I looked down at him. His hair was messed—pressed flat on one side, sticking up on the other. He looked human. He looked like a man who had said I love you against his wife’s ear in the dark and meant it and woken up in the grey morning still meaning it and was now being asked to get out of bed and face the world.

“I want something,” I said.

His eyes moved to my face. The same attention he gave everything—total, focused, patient.

“A date,” I said. “With my husband. Tonight. A real date.”

“Where?”

“Surprise me.”

He considered this. I watched him consider it—the slight tilt of his head, the way his thumb moved against the phone case, the brief, calculating silence of a man who treated restaurant selection with the same strategic gravity he treated Bratva negotiations.

“At home,” he said. “I’ll arrange something.”

“At home,” I agreed. “But we dress for it.”

“Dress for a date in our own dining room?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to court you?”

“I want you to court me. Even now. Especially now.”

He looked at me. The morning light had shifted—warmer now, the grey giving way to pale gold that fell across the bedsheet between us. His hand came up and pushed the hair back from my face. His fingers lingered at my temple.