Page 204 of Dark King Daddy

I added the stair. Then I realized I was still drawing, although I had already shown her what I meant.

Ksenia said nothing.

When I finally put the pencil down, she took the sheet and wrote the date in the corner.

“I’m keeping this.”

“It’s barely a sketch.”

“It’s the first one you’ve done for me.”

She rolled it carefully with the other drawings and put them back in the tube.

I caught her by the waist before she could move away. Her hands settled on my coat. I kissed her beneath the old window, hard hat knocking softly against hers.

She laughed into my mouth.

“Very smooth, Sokolov.”

“There he is,” Arkady said when we walked into Volna. “New York’s most expensive apprentice.”

“I’m deleting that photograph.”

“Too late. Kiryl has made it his phone background.”

Kiryl held up his phone.

I looked at my wife. She was removing her coat with a serenity I did not trust.

“Family is so important,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

“It’s overrated,” I said, faux-grumpy.

Eight places around the table. Yelena and Sal on one side, my brothers making too much noise on the other, Anton already reaching for Ksenia’s coat. He kissed her cheek and asked about the bathhouse before she had even sat down.

“She’s converted me,” I told him.

“To architecture?”

“To being told where to stand.”

“That happened months ago,” Yelena said.

Sal poured me wine with an expression of deep sympathy that did not survive his wife’s glance.

It was good to have them here. Yelena had greeted me at the door with a hug so fierce that I had stopped trying to say hello. She had done the same to Ksenia, then immediately begun arguing with Kiryl about his coat.

Now she stole an olive from Sal’s plate. He moved the plate closer without looking.

Food arrived from the kitchen downstairs: fish, potatoes, platters of meat, enough bread to feed another table. The waitress set a basket beside Arkady. He looked up at her as though she had personally saved his life.

“My favorite woman.”

“You say that to all the waitresses.”

“And I always mean it!”

She gave him an extra roll. Kiryl watched this with outrage.