Page 97 of Dark King Daddy

Ksenia bent down immediately. Her hand went to the floor.

I crossed the room in three steps and caught her wrist.

“Don’t move.”

She went still.

Not the stiff stillness of a woman startled by a man’s grip. Not the rigid stillness of resistance. She went still the way a held breath goes still—total, immediate, the cessation of all motion as though a switch had been thrown somewhere inside her that she did not control.

Her wrist was small in my hand. The bones were fine beneath my fingers. Her pulse beat against my thumb—quick, then slowing, then slower still.

Her shoulders dropped.

I watched it happen. The tension that had been holding her upright—the rigid posture of a woman compensating for exhaustion with willpower—released. Not all of it. Not dramatically. But the line of her spine softened. Her chin, which had been jutting forward with the particular stubbornness of a woman who refused to stop working, lowered.

“Okay,” she said.

Her voice had changed. The polished, articulate register she wore like armor was gone. What remained was quieter. Simpler. The same voice I had heard on the sitting room floor with the rabbit.

I held her wrist for one more second. Then I released it.

“Stay there.”

I crouched. The glass was everywhere—large shards, tiny splinters, the fine dust that would embed in a bare foot without warning. I collected each piece by hand, placing them on the counter in a row. I swept the smaller fragments into my palm. I checked the tile around the island, the gap beneath the cabinet, the path to the stove.

Ksenia watched me. She had not moved. Her hands rested in her lap. Her bare feet were drawn up onto the stool’s footrest, lifted away from the floor.

When the floor was clear, I stood. I went to the hallway closet and found her slippers—they were ridiculous, oversized, fleece-lined, a dark purple that had no business existing in my house. I carried them back to the kitchen.

I set them on the floor in front of her stool.

“Put these on.”

She slid her feet into them. The slippers swallowed her feet. She looked down at them, then at me, and something moved across her face that I could not name. It was not amusement. It was not embarrassment. It was closer to recognition—the expression of a woman seeing something she had been looking for without knowing she was looking.

The kitchen was very quiet. The pendant light hummed above us. The drawings lay scattered between coffee cups. Her phone had not buzzed in hours.

I should have said good night. I should have walked out. The moment had been instinctive—a command, an obedience, a clearing of broken glass—and instinct was not a foundation I could build on.

“Daniil?”

She looked up.

“Yes?”

“Why do you keep retreating from me?”

The question was direct. She delivered it in the simpler voice, the one without the polish, and the directness of it sat in the air between us.

“You kissed me on the promenade,” she continued. “Then you retreated. You made me macaroni and sat across the room and left. You caught my wrist just now and then you let go. You keep pulling back.”

“You wanted a kiss,” I said. “I gave you a kiss.”

Her eyes searched my face.

“I didn’t ask for every decision that comes after it. Desire is not a contract. A kiss is not permission to take over your life. And a moment of instinct —“ I gestured toward the cleared floor, the slippers on her feet. “—is not a dynamic. It is a moment.”

“You told me not to move and I didn’t move. You saw what it did to me. I want to obey you.”