Page 77 of Dark King Daddy

When the bowl was empty, she set it down. She picked up the mug of hot chocolate and held it in both hands. The warmth seemed to settle something in her.

She looked at me across the room.

“Do you think I’m ridiculous?”

“No.”

Her eyes searched my face.

“I think everybody has needed something from you all week,” I said. “Your brother. Your father’s organization. The alliance. The drivers. The clients. Every room you walked into, someone needed you to be competent and composed and useful.”

She did not speak.

“This is the first thing you have allowed yourself to need.”

Her grip tightened on the mug. She looked down into the hot chocolate. Steam rose and touched her face.

“What do you expect from me now?” she asked.

Her voice was still quiet. Still simpler than her public register. The armor had not come back. She was asking from inside the vulnerability, not from behind it.

“Nothing.”

She looked at me.

I held her gaze. I did not push. I did not soften. I gave her the same thing I had given her at the altar — presence, without demand. My hand closed around hers when it trembled. My silence when she needed quiet. My distance when she needed space.

“Nothing,” I repeated.

She pulled the blanket tighter around herself. The rabbit’s ear emerged briefly above the wool, grey and threadbare, before she tucked it back.

She took a sip of hot chocolate.

Ksenia watched the screen. I watched the door. The house was quiet around us, and the ocean moved two blocks away, and somewhere in the space between the armchair and the floor, something shifted.

I stayed in the armchair until the movie ended. She did not ask me to leave. I did not offer to stay.

When the credits rolled, she was asleep. The mug was empty in her hands. The rabbit was visible now, no longer hidden, tucked beneath her chin.

I turned off the television. I turned off the lamp.

I left the door open a crack and went to my own room, and for the first time in a week, I slept.

Chapter 6

Ksenia

Iwoke with the rabbit under my chin.

Morning light filled the sitting room—pale November sun through curtains I did not remember closing. The greenhouse pieces sat on the coffee table where I had left them, glue dried cloudy on the fourth wall. The macaroni bowl had been taken. The hot chocolate mug had been taken. The blanket was still around my shoulders.

Then the night arrived. All of it. Every second.

The door opening. Daniil in the doorway. The lamp behind him. My hands clutching the rabbit against my chest and the look on his face—not shock, not disgust, not amusement. Recognition. He had known what he was looking at.

He had made me macaroni.

I sat up fast. The blanket fell to my waist. I grabbed the rabbit and shoved it under the pillow, then stood and looked down at myself. Lavender pajamas. Pink and cream striped socks. I looked like a woman who had been caught in the middle of something she would rather die than explain.