Page 164 of Dark King Daddy

“When what?”

“When did you learn to dance. And why was this information withheld.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I asked you to tell me something ordinary. You told me about brutalist architecture.”

“Architecture is more interesting than dancing.”

“Architecture is not more interesting than discovering my husband can dance. Nothing is more interesting than that. This is a betrayal of the highest order.”

“You’ve been keeping me occupied. I haven’t had time to demonstrate all my skills.”

“What other skills exist?”

“None that are appropriate for the living room.”

I laughed. He turned me—a slow, deliberate rotation that moved us across the floor in a way that felt less like dancing and more like being transported. The living room was small. The furniture pressed in. We had to navigate around the sofa and the coffee table and the lamp that I had already knocked into once with my hip.

I took the lead.

I shifted my weight forward, pressed my hand against his shoulder, and stepped into him — reversing the frame, turning the lead upside down. He resisted for half a second. Then he followed. His body adjusted, his feet moved, and I danced him backward across the room with the particular satisfaction of a woman who had found a new way to challenge a man who was difficult to challenge.

“You’re leading,” he said, amused.

“I noticed.”

“This is not traditional.”

“Neither is marrying a Bratva Pakhan due to strategy and then liking it. Life is full of surprises.”

He let me lead for eight bars. Then he took it back—smoothly, without force, a pressure through his hand on my waist that redirected my momentum until I was turning under his arm and coming back to his chest. The turn was clean. The catch was precise. I ended up against him with my back to his front, his hand on my stomach, both of us breathing slightly harder than the dancing warranted.

“Show-off,” I said.

“You started it.”

The song changed. Slower. The man’s voice dropped lower, and the instruments thinned until it was just a guitar and the voice and the particular silence of a room where two people were standing very close and not moving.

Daniil’s chin rested on my shoulder. His hand lay flat on my stomach. I could feel his breathing against my back—slow, even, the rhythm of a man whose body had found the place it wanted to be.

“Thank you for tonight,” I said.

I turned in his arms. I faced him. His hands found my waist. My arms went around his neck. The music played. We barely moved—a small sway, a shifting of weight, the kind of dancing that was really just standing together with an excuse.

He kissed my forehead. My temple. The spot below my ear where my pulse beat and where he always paused, always lingered, as though the rhythm of my blood was something he wanted to learn.

His phone rang.

The sound cut through the music—sharp, insistent, the particular ringtone he had assigned to Nikita. Not a text. A call. The kind of communication that meant the summary could not wait for a summary.

“I fucking hate phones,” he growled.

Daniil’s arms tightened for one second. Then he released me. He crossed to the shelf and picked up the phone.

“Nikita.”

I heard Nikita’s voice. Not the words—just the tone, the particular clipped efficiency that meant information was being delivered in the order it had been verified. Daniil listened. His face did not change. His posture did not change. But his hand—the one not holding the phone—curled into a fist at his side, and the fist tightened, and the knuckles went white.