Page 5 of Dark King Daddy

The private dining room on the second floor of Sokolov House held a table for eight, a sideboard, and a window that faced the alley. The kitchen sent up roast chicken, potatoes, bread, and a salad that Arkady ignored with the dedication of a man who considered greenery a personal insult. Nikita ate everything. I ate chicken and bread and drank black coffee and reviewed the team assignments for the third time.

Arkady put his fork down.

“Twelve men,” he said. “For a chop shop in Newark.”

“Twelve men,” I confirmed.

“Six would do it.”

“Your idea of sufficient manpower is having one person conscious at the end.”

Nikita buttered a piece of bread. “This explains several disastrous family Christmases. Everyone unconscious except you, Arkady.”

Arkady looked at him. Nikita looked back with an expression of perfect innocence.

“The Christmas of 2015,” Nikita continued. “You brought out that special vodka from Kuznetsk.”

“It’s not my fault the rest of my family are lightweights.”

“Grisha left in an ambulance.”

Arkady’s mouth twitched. He picked up his fork again. I heard him exhale through his nose — the closest Arkady came to laughing in the presence of witnesses.

“As I said, lightweights.”

Nikita caught my eye and smiled. I let myself hold the moment for a second. Two seconds. The three of us at a table with food, arguing about nothing, being exactly what we were before Lev decided we needed to be something else.

Then the door opened and Kiryl walked in.

The youngest of us, he was twenty. The family coloring was there — the pale eyes — but in him the sharpness had not arrived. His face still held the softness that Lev read as failure and I recognized as the absence of damage. He wore a university hoodie and jeans and carried a backpack slung over one shoulder. His hair needed cutting.

“Laptop charger,” he said, crossing to the sideboard where the spare cables lived in a drawer. “I left mine in the office upstairs.”

“Have you eaten?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What?”

He paused with his hand in the drawer. “A sandwich.”

“From where?”

“From the café near campus.”

“You came here alone?”

“I took the subway.”

Kiryl had been practically brought up by our sister, Yelena — even though she was just a few years older than him. Now that she was married to an Italian, Salvatore, Kiryl was finding his feet.

“Nikita could have sent a car.”

“I don’t need a car for a twenty-minute train ride.” He found the charger and held it up. “I don’t require four substitute mothers.”

“Yelena already checks on you from Chicago,” Nikita said. “We’re redundant.”

Kiryl’s expression shifted. The mention of Yelena always landed differently with him.