Page 168 of Dark King Daddy

“She’s already standing in the doorway. She heard the name.”

I heard Yelena’s voice in the background—clipped, rapid, Russian. The consonants carried.

“She wants to know if Ksenia is hurt,” Sal said.

“She’s not hurt. She’s in danger.”

“Same word, in this family.”

“Sal.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Bring her safe. I’ll send the flight details within the hour.”

He hung up. I set the phone down.

Ksenia sat on the sofa. The blue dress. The bare feet. The hair I had watched her pin up before dinner, loose now, falling across her shoulders. She looked like a woman who had been courted and danced and loved and then handed a war.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Private flight. Sal’s people meet you. Yelena’s at the house.”

She stood. She extended her hand. I took it. We went upstairs. She undressed in the amber light—the blue dress first, sliding the zipper down, stepping out of it. She hung it on the back of the closet door. It swayed once and went still.

She put on the pajamas. The cartoon cats. The flannel soft from washing.

I changed beside her. My own clothes. The t-shirt, the loose trousers I slept in. We moved in the small space of the bedroom—her at the closet, me at the dresser—and our elbows touched once and neither of us flinched.

She got into bed first. She lay on her side. Her back to the window, her face toward the center of the mattress—toward where I would be.

I turned off the lamp. The room went dark. The porch light bled through the curtain gap—a thin line of gold across the floor.

I lay down beside her. She turned onto her other side and I put my arm across her waist. I pulled her against me—her back to my chest, her shoulders settling against my ribs, her cold feet finding my shins.

“Your feet are freezing.”

She laughed. Small. Barely there. A single exhale that carried more warmth than the sound suggested.

I held her. I pressed my face into her hair. The crisis had started with a phone call at 2:47, with smoke rising from the yard, and it had not stopped since.

Her breathing slowed. The tension left her shoulders in stages—first the right, then the left, then the long muscles along her spine. I felt each release against my chest.

She slept.

The porch light burned outside. Boris was downstairs. The house was locked.

Kostya was in the wind.

I held my wife and I did not sleep.

The phone rang at five-eleven.

Ksenia did not wake. Her breathing stayed even. Her body stayed warm against my side.

“Anton.”

“Daniil.” His voice was wrong. The measured, deliberate cadence he normally maintained was gone—replaced by something raw, something that cracked at the edges. “They took the building.”