Page 165 of Dark King Daddy

“Put it on speaker,” I said.

He looked at me. I was standing in the middle of the living room in my blue dress, my arms still holding the shape of him. He put it on speaker.

“—manager of Volna,” Nikita was saying. “Semyon Orlov. Forty-three. Been running the building for eleven years. Arkady brought him in this afternoon. He talked.”

“What did he say?” Daniil asked.

“He said Kostya approached him three weeks before the murders. Asked him to keep him informed about Volna’s security arrangements. On the morning of the meeting, Semyon gave him the temporary code.”

The living room was very quiet. The music had stopped—the phone call had interrupted the playlist, and the silence that replaced it had a physical weight.

“Kostya told him Lev had asked him to check the arrangements. Semyon believed him—or said he believed him. He wrote the code down and handed it to Kostya that morning.”

“The code for the service cupboard.”

“Yes. The one Gusev used to get the gun.”

I pressed my hand to my mouth. The implication landed—not slowly, not in pieces, all at once. The security code. The private room. The meeting where two fathers had died.

“Why didn’t he come forward?” Daniil asked.

“He says he was afraid. He says after the murders, he realized what the code had been used for. He tried to talk to Kostya. Kostya told him to forget it. Semyon says Kostya’s exact words were: ‘You remember nothing. You gave no one anything. If you speak, I will make sure you have nothing left to speak with.’”

“Kostya threatened him?”

“Directly. Repeatedly. Semyon kept silent because he believed the threat. He’s been running Volna for eleven years and he’s never been so frightened of a man that he couldn’t sleep.”

I sat down. I did not choose the sofa—my legs simply found it. The blue dress pooled around my knees. My hands rested in my lap. I stared at the phone on the shelf.

“Where is Kostya now?” Daniil asked.

“Arkady went to find him. His apartment in Bay Ridge. His wife says he left this morning and hasn’t returned. His phone is off. His car is still in the garage. He’s gone, Daniil. We’re checking the safe houses and the known contacts, but he’s in the wind.”

Daniil was silent. I watched him process it.

Kostya. My father’s brother-in-law. The man who had stood at Mikhail’s funeral with his hands folded and his face grey. The man who had raised the issue at Volna—the Maspeth arrangement, the dependency, the renegotiation.

My uncle.

“Nikita,” I said. “What happens next?”

Nikita’s voice was careful. The gentleness he used when he understood that what he was saying cost something.

“We find him. Arkady is running the known locations. I’m pulling his financials and communication records now—the access Anton gave us. If Kostya has been working with Viktor, there will be a trail. Money, messages, meetings. Men who betray organizations leave fingerprints. Even careful ones.”

“And if he’s already with the Voronins?”

“Then we have our answer about how deep this goes. And we plan accordingly. For war. Bloody, violent war.”

Chapter 15

Daniil

The phone sat on the shelf. The call had ended and the room was very quiet. Ksenia looked simply heartbroken.

I crossed to the sofa, sat beside her. Her hands rested in her lap, fingers laced together and pressed white at the knuckles.

“He was at the funeral,” she said.