Page 96 of Dark King Daddy

I picked up my coffee. It had gone cold. I drank it anyway.

The operations room settled into the silence of men who had just learned that the ground beneath their feet was not solid. Six names. Six men trusted with a code that had opened a door and let death through it.

I had spent my life inside an organization built on loyalty. On the certainty that blood and oath and shared history meant something. That the men beside you would not sell you.

Someone had.

We spent the rest of the day going through staff interviews and access logs. I left Beard Street at ten-thirty that night. The investigation would take days. Weeks, possibly. The kind of work that required patience and the suppression of every instinct telling me to grab someone by the throat and demand answers.

Nikita drove. I sat in the passenger seat and watched the harbor lights slide across the windshield and thought about six names and one code and the particular mathematics of betrayal. Five men trusted. One man talking. The odds were not comforting.

But I barely thought about security.

I thought about Ksenia. I thought about her the entire drive. I couldn’t wait to see her.

The house on Dover Street was dark when we arrived. Nikita’s car pulled away. Pavel stood at the front entrance and nodded once as I passed. The front hall was quiet. The lights were off. Galina had gone home hours ago.

Then I saw it.

Light beneath the kitchen door. Warm. Low. The particular amber of the pendant fixture over the island.

I pushed the door open.

Ksenia sat at the island on a high stool, barefoot, her hair loose around her shoulders. Her blazer was draped over the chair back. The cream blouse was untucked. Her sleeves were pushed to the elbows. Harbor House drawings covered the counter—elevation plans, material schedules, a detail sheet for the quarter-sawn oak replacement with her annotations in blue pencil. Three coffee cups in various states of emptiness. Her phone face-down beside the drawings. An Orlov dispatch folder, unopened.

She was correcting a measurement on the floor detail. Her pen moved in short, precise strokes. She did not look up.

The clock on the wall read eleven-forty.

“You’re working,” I said.

She looked up. Her eyes were heavy. Not the sharp hazel-green of the morning—softer, blurred at the edges, the particular unfocused quality of a woman who had been staring at drawings for hours and had stopped seeing them clearly.

“I’m finishing.”

“It’s eleven-forty.”

“I’m aware of the time.”

“Have you eaten?”

“I had something earlier.”

“What?”

“A granola bar.”

“That’s not eating, it’s snacking.”

“It was adequate.”

I set my keys on the counter. I looked at the drawings. The material schedule. The dispatch folder she had not opened—Orlov business, waiting for her attention while she poured herself into someone else’s building. The three coffee cups. The blue pencil. The smudge of graphite on her left cheek where she had rested her hand.

She was overworked. She was exhausted. She reached for a clean glass on the counter behind her. Her hand was not steady. The exhaustion had reached her fingers, and the glass caught the edge of her palm and tipped.

It fell.

The sound was sharp and sudden—the crack of glass on stone counter, then the harder shatter of it hitting the tile floor. Fragments scattered across the kitchen. Some slid beneath the island. Some spun to the baseboard. A shard landed six inches from her bare foot.