Page 69 of Dark King Daddy

I considered this. The instinct to protect pushed hard against the principle she was drawing. Every part of me that had been trained by Lev wanted to say: I will keep you safe, and that means I decide what safe looks like. But I had watched Lev’s version of safety turn Yelena’s life into a cage with gilded bars.

“Agreed,” I said. “Together.”

She nodded once.

“Separate bedrooms,” she continued.

“I would have insisted on that myself.”

Something flickered in her eyes. Surprise, perhaps. Or a question she did not ask.

“No expectation of children,” she said.

“None.”

“No public humiliation of either family. No behavior that would undermine Anton’s authority or yours.”

“Of course.”

She looked at the papers on the desk. Then at me.

“So you accept?”

I studied her. The charcoal coat. The dark sweater beneath it. The gold studs catching the light from Lev’s window. She looked like a woman who had prepared for a battle and found the other side already laying down arms.

“Ksenia.”

She looked up.

“My refusal was not about desire.”

The words changed the room. I felt it happen—the air between us shifting from negotiation into something more exposed.

She did not speak.

“I am not indifferent to you,” I said. “I have never been indifferent to you. What I felt in the corridor at Volna was not . . . strategy.”

Color moved up her throat. She pressed her lips together.

“I refused because I will not take a woman who is offering herself under pressure. Not because I do not want her.”

“Daniil.” Her voice was quiet. “Circumstances have limited both our choices. You did not choose to inherit a threatened organization. I did not choose to lose my father. Neither of us chose the Voronins.”

“No.”

“But the choice that remains is still mine. Whether I walk into this. Whether I stay.”

“And you are choosing to walk in.”

“I am.”

I looked at her across my father’s desk. She sat in the chair where Mikhail Orlov had sat, where Anton had sat, where captains and allies and enemies had sat across from Lev and understood that the man behind the desk held their fate in his hands.

Ksenia did not look like a woman whose fate was in anyone’s hands but her own.

“Are you choosing me?” I asked.

A pause. Not hesitation. Consideration.