Chapter 6
Ivan
I told myself entering her apartment was necessary.
That was the problem with being intelligent enough to build a convincing argument.
Given sufficient time, I could make almost anything make sense.
I could line up the logic in neat rows, label the risks, assign probability values, and make the conclusion appear inevitable.
A less careful man might have called it obsession. I called it situational coverage.
Kit Calloway was exposed.
That was fact.
The Orlovs were closing in on her. Pavel was gone only because I had made him go.
The sedan had disappeared because Sergei had encouraged its occupants to reconsider their professional ambitions.
The camera angle outside her building had been corrected because I did not like blind spots near her door, and the light above the entrance had been repaired because the incompetence of her building management offended me on both security and aesthetic grounds.
None of this was the issue.
The issue was that I knew that Mikhail’s people would not stop.
They might slow. They might misread the trail I had laid for them.
They might lose a day, two days, perhaps a week if their analyst remained mediocre and their arrogance remained high, which was generally a reliable bet with the Orlovs, but eventually, they would look again.
And when they did, Kit’s apartment would become the center of the problem.
Remote access was possible, of course. Most things were possible.
But possible and wise were not the same thing, and I had developed an allergy to men who confused them.
Kit watched her systems like a woman waiting for an attack.
A poorly timed connection would be seen.
A well-timed connection might be seen. Even if I entered cleanly, I would be stepping into her domain in a way that would give too much of myself away.
Installing my own hardware would be faster.
I could observe everything that way. Hallway movement. Window approach. Fire escape activity. Unusual signal presence. Installing my own cameras would give me the kind of data I would need if the Orlovs came before I had time to intercept them further upstream.
So, at 11:18 on Monday morning, while Kit Calloway sat in a consultation meeting twelve blocks away with a biotech client whose network architecture looked like it had been designed during a fire drill, I let myself into her apartment.
I did not break anything. Breaking things was for amateurs and men who wanted the world to know they had arrived.
Her hallway was empty. Her building cameras saw what I wanted them to see. The lock yielded without complaint, which irritated me because it should not have been so easy, even though I had made a career out of things not being difficult enough for me.
I opened the door two inches and stopped.
She had set a trap.
There was clear string taped on the inside edge of the frame, a pressure mat under the rug, and a small camera hidden in the dead smoke detector near the hallway. She had made a little nest of suspicion around her own front door.
Good girl.
The thought arrived before I could stop it.
My hand tightened on the edge of the door.
No.
Not again.
She was not my girl. She was not anything yet except a brilliant, reckless young woman.
The praise was inappropriate. So was the warmth it left behind. I ignored them both.
I stepped inside and replaced the string marker exactly. I made sure to steer clear of the rug and kept myself in the camera’s blind spot. By the time the door eased shut behind me, every one of her traps was still waiting for an intruder who was already inside.
The apartment was smaller than it looked through camera angles and building schematics, though not by much.
There was a brick wall along one side. Her desk was facing the room.
Couch positioned with its back to a solid surface.
The kitchen was clean. There was only one chair at the table.
Her bookshelves were arranged by a system I did not immediately understand and therefore wanted to.
The place felt like her.
It wasn’t cozy or soft, or intentionally pretty, nor was it a room designed to charm visitors because she clearly did not want visitors.
It felt defensive. Alive with quiet contingency.
Every object seemed to have a reason, even if that reason was only that she had decided it belonged there and no one else had been invited to comment.
I liked it immediately, which was inconvenient.
I set the first device near the front entry, buried in the architecture already present enough that it would not create a new visual anomaly.
The second went near the window facing the fire escape.
The third was not surveillance in the strict sense, but an alarm layer tied to signal disturbance.
If someone came too close to her space with the wrong equipment, I would know.
Seven minutes.
That was all it took.
Ten minutes later, the work was complete. I had done what I came to do. The apartment was undisturbed. My devices were silent, dark, and nearly invisible. Instead of leaving, I stood in the center of her living room and listened.
There were a thousand reasons for a room to be quiet. Empty rooms were quiet. Dead rooms were quiet. Rooms waiting for someone to come home had a different quality to them, almost like a held breath, a sense of life paused rather than absent.
Kit’s apartment was not empty.
It was full of her.
That was the first truly dangerous thought of the morning.
I looked at my watch.
It was 11:26 now.
I decided to stay a bit longer.
Her desk drew me first, naturally. It was the center of the room and the center of her life.
She had two monitors. A laptop dock. A secondary machine off to the side.
A mechanical keyboard with worn keycaps and one small scratch along the space bar.
A ceramic mug with coffee dried in the bottom.
Three pens, all black. A fourth one blue.
A stack of sticky notes clinging to the monitor frame like evidence.
I did not touch the keyboard.
I did read the notes though.
Gray coat missing. Why?
Evan = Do not reply.
Eat actual food, idiot.
That last one made my jaw tighten.
I turned toward the kitchen before I had decided to move. Her refrigerator was predictably bleak. She had written herself a note to eat actual food and had apparently declined to take her own advice.
My palm flexed once at my side.
The image came too easily, Kit pinned over my knee, bottom bare, furious and flushed and incredibly sore, learning exactly what happened to stubborn girls who treated their bodies like disposable hardware. It would be the first real spanking of her entire life, no doubt.
My cock responded with a hard, immediate pulse of interest.
I went still.
“Get a grip, Ivan,” I murmured.
The words sounded too loud in her kitchen.
I had no right to think of her like that in the middle of her apartment while she was not here to look me in the eye and tell me to go to hell.
Not yet…
The two words came after the denial, quieter and much worse.
I rubbed a hand over my jaw and turned back toward the desk.
I needed to focus on work.
That was safer.
Her secondary machine was locked, as expected. The encryption program she used made me pause for the first time since entering the apartment.
Valkyrie.
I had written Valkyrie six years ago and buried it afterward, but apparently not thoroughly enough. Kit Calloway had found my own program and used it to lock away her file on me, which was so audacious I almost smiled.
I had the recovery seed, of course. Not because I expected to need it, but because I had written the thing, and I never trusted my own code less than other people’s intentions. I entered the key sequence from memory, waited through the challenge, and watched the file open.
Watcher.
It should have been irritating to read about myself when reduced to fragments. It was.
It was also fascinating.
She’d labeled me as an unknown actor. She didn’t think I was associated with the Orlovs or law enforcement either.
Very good.
Possibly watching me specifically.
Male? Tall. Dark coat. Unremarkable enough to be intentional.
I read that line twice. Then again.
She had almost nothing. A few route behaviors. A vanished scout. A corrected camera angle. A dark coat in a reflection. A feeling based almost entirely on instinct.
It was almost nothing.
It was also, somehow, exactly right.
I stood in the blue-white glow of her screen and felt something open quietly in my chest.
Most people missed me entirely. That was by design though.
My brothers saw me because they had earned the right through blood, history, and irritating persistence.
Enemies saw only what I allowed them to see.
Women usually saw the glasses, the dry wit, the tablet I typically carried in my hand, and assumed the rest of me was softer than Nikolai’s fists or Maxim’s authority.
Kit had seen me, at least a little bit of me.
I wanted to see what she would write next. That, more than anything, told me I was in trouble.
I closed the file, restored everything exactly as it had been, and checked the time.
11:43.
I had now been in her apartment eighteen minutes longer than necessary.
I looked around the room and noticed the crossword sitting half-finished on the kitchen table beside a pencil, a folded napkin, and a mug with a chip on the rim. It was paper. The kind from an actual newspaper, neatly cut out and creased once down the middle.
I crossed to it before I gave myself permission.
Most of the grid was filled in. Her handwriting was clear and tight, letters pressed a little too firmly into the boxes. Three blanks remained, circled so faintly I doubted she realized she had done it.
14 Across: River through St. Petersburg.
22 Down: Trap made of a noose.
31 Across: Old cipher machine.
That one made me huff a quiet laugh. She knew that answer. She had to. Which meant she had either been too tired to see it or too irritated with the puzzle to let it have the satisfaction.
I looked at the pencil. Then at the door. Then back at the grid.
This was stupid. This was risk. This created evidence. It created contact. It took an invisible entry and made it personal in a way no competent man would allow.
I picked up the pencil and wrote in all three answers.
Three glaring mistakes.
I set the pencil down exactly where it had been and stared at what I had done.
A part of me wanted to erase it, the sensible part, the part that still believed this could be contained if I simply returned to procedure and stopped behaving like a man unraveling in the apartment of a woman who did not know his name.
I did not erase it.
I exhaled slowly.
“Careless,” I said under my breath.
My voice contained no conviction. The bedroom door was half-open. That was where I shouldn’t have gone.
So naturally, I did.
I did not cross the threshold at first. I stood in the doorway and told myself I was checking sightlines to the window, possible entry points, whether the old fire escape could be reached from the bedroom if the living room became compromised.
All valid questions. All irrelevant to the fact that my attention went first to her bed.
Unmade on one side only.
The right side, if standing at the foot.
The blanket kicked down, sheet twisted, pillow flattened at the edge where she must have slept curled toward the window instead of the door, despite all her caution elsewhere.
A sweater hung over the chair back, black and soft-looking, one sleeve turned inside out.
Her boots were lined up near the closet, one slightly ahead of the other.
There was no perfume in the room. Just clean laundry, stale coffee, the lemon cleaner she used in the rest of the apartment, and underneath it something strong enough to affect me that I could only identify as her.
I wanted to touch the sweater.
I wanted to straighten the blanket.
I wanted to stand in the room long enough to know whether the book on the nightstand had frustrated her or comforted her before she fell asleep.
I wanted things that had no place in an operational assessment.
My cock had been half-hard since the refrigerator, and now the ache settled deeper, hotter, less willing to be ignored. I closed my eyes for one second, just one, and imagined her in that bed with her hair loose against the pillow, eyes closed, mouth soft.
No.
I opened my eyes.
I couldn’t do that.
Those were the rules I gave myself, as though rules made this less wrong.
I remained in the doorway for seven minutes.
Seven.
Then I planted the last bit of hardware I had in my pocket in her bedroom. There really wasn’t a reason for it being there. I just wanted it to be there.
Then I stepped back. The apartment seemed different when I returned to the living room.
A book lay face-down on the arm of the couch with its spine bent in a way that would have made Aleksei wince.
I checked every marker again. The tape. The mat.
The position of the chair. The angle of the crossword, though that no longer mattered because I had already ruined it.
I wiped nothing because I had left nothing careless enough to wipe.
I locked the door behind me and restored the hall exactly as it had been.
At 11:58, I was gone. I’d spent forty minutes inside.
Seven for the work. Thirty-three for the woman.
That was a terrible imbalance, and I should have been ashamed of it, but I spent the drive back to the Iron Wolf thinking about the three crossword answers and the way she had described me with almost no evidence at all.
I returned twice more that week.
The first time, I told myself it was to verify signal integrity after a storm rattled the building hard enough to create false motion alerts on the fire escape.
The second time, I told myself Orlov traffic had shifted near her block, and I needed visual confirmation that nothing had been planted outside her window. Both reasons were true, but neither was the whole truth.
By the third visit, I stopped writing justifications down. That was the beginning of the real problem, which was that each time I entered Kit Calloway’s apartment, it became harder to pretend I was only making sure she survived.
I wanted her alive, but a part of me was growing with each passing day.
I wanted her.
Over my knee with her bottom bright red.
Writhing underneath me in my bed.
I wanted her in every way that would make her mine.