Chapter 15 #2
She didn’t gasp out loud or curse. There wasn’t even the smallest intake of breath most people gave when danger stopped being theoretical and became a street, a building, a door.
Kit went silent.
“How long do I have?” she asked.
“Twenty-four hours before they move on you physically. Possibly less.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I have been inside the same investigation longer than you have.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the beginning of one.”
“I hate beginnings that sound like lies.”
“I understand that.”
The words slipped out too softly.
“Who are you, Ivan?”
There it was.
“My name is Ivan Dmitri Morozov.”
“You’ve already told me your name.”
“Yes.”
“I’m asking for the part men like you leave off conference badges.”
I looked at the Orlov report with her name in it, then at the live feed of her dark window, then at the cheap blue pen beside my keyboard. This was the point at which the door opened just enough for everything after to become inevitable.
“I am Morozov Bratva,” I said. “My family controls territory, money, protection, private security, and several things no one polite puts on a conference badge. My brother Maxim leads the family. My brothers enforce it in different ways. I run intelligence. Surveillance, attribution, financial systems, hostile infrastructure. I have been watching Mikhail Orlov’s operation for years. ”
“And you just happened to notice me?”
“No.”
“Careful, Ivan.”
The warning in her voice slid across my skin like a blade.
I liked it too much.
“No,” I repeated. “I found you inside his systems.”
“That was weeks ago.”
“Yes.”
“You knew who I was before the conference.”
“Yes.”
“How long before?”
“Long enough.”
“Wrong answer.”
“It is the answer I can give you tonight.”
Her laugh was humorless. “That’s convenient.”
“It is not.”
“Then give me the inconvenient one.”
I looked toward the door, as though Sergei might still be standing there with his brutal, silent insistence that secrets became graves if kept too long.
Not yet.
I could tell her Morozov. I could tell her Orlov. I could tell her the conference had been engineered and that she was in danger and that the next twenty-four hours mattered more than her pride.
I could not tell her I had been in her apartment, at least not over the phone.
Not while she was alone in that same apartment with Orlov’s attention only temporarily redirected.
Not when the truth would make her run from me before I could close the net around the threat. She deserved to know and she would.
But not yet.
“I found evidence of a secondary actor in Orlov infrastructure,” I said. “Someone skilled. Someone careful. Someone too personally motivated to be law enforcement. I traced it. I traced you.”
“Why not turn me over to your brother?”
“Because I knew what he would do.”
“What would he do?”
“Protect the family first.”
“And you?”
My hand closed around the pen again.
“I am protecting you.”
The words were too much truth and she heard it.
Kit always heard the thing beneath the thing.
“Ivan,” she said slowly, “you need to understand that I am not comforted by Russian mafia protection delivered at three-thirty in the morning by a man who admits he arranged a meeting under false pretenses.”
“I do understand.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
“I understand you are angry. I understand you are already deciding which parts of this are useful and which parts you can ignore. I understand you are thinking about opening the Orlov file again the second I hang up because fear makes you want more information, and information makes you feel less helpless.”
Silence.
“Stop doing that,” she said.
“What?”
“Stop knowing things.”
I almost smiled.
“I know one more thing,” I said.
“I doubt it’s going to improve my mood.”
“No. But it may keep you alive.”
“Say it.”
“You need to trust me for the next twenty-four hours.”
“You want trust, give me proof.”
“Orlov moved a shell route through the Saint Petersburg chain at 1:12 this morning. Their Boston node lit up seven minutes later. They tied the intrusion signature to your old contract and corrected the false trail I built for them. At 2:04, they found your name. At 2:41, they found your address. I planted a false trail and redirected them to Chicago. That bought you time, but not enough.”
Her breath caught.
She knew the Saint Petersburg chain. She knew enough of the Boston node to hear the truth in what I said. She knew I had not guessed. She knew, now, that I had been closer to the Orlov network than she had understood.
“You redirected them?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where in Chicago?”
“West Loop Hotel. It’s a temporary trail.”
“That won’t hold.”
“No.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hate that answer.”
“So do I.”
For one moment, neither of us spoke.
Then she said, “What do you want me to do?”
There it was. She hadn’t surrendered and she probably never would. But it was the first small crack in the wall between her pride and the reality of the threat. I savored it for exactly half a second because that was all the emergency allowed.
“Do not leave your apartment tonight,” I said. “Do not touch the Orlov file from any system connected to your normal patterns. Do not contact your old clients. Do not call your ex-boyfriend.”
“Evan?” she said, startled.
I closed my eyes.
That had been a mistake.
“How do you know about Evan?”
“He is a risk if you use him as a variable.”
“How do you know about Evan, Ivan?”
The temperature of her voice dropped ten degrees. I had crossed too close to the hidden door.
“I know enough to tell you he is not equipped for this,” I said.
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No.”
“You’re dodging.”
“Yes.”
“Badly.”
That almost made me laugh, even now. Especially now.
“You deserve a real conversation,” I said.
“You think?”
“Yes. And you will get one.”
“When?”
“After I can be sure you are not walking into an Orlov ambush because you would rather punish me than protect yourself.”
“Punish you?”
The disbelief in her voice was exquisite.
My cock thickened again because the thought of Kit punishing me was amusing, but the thought of putting her over my knee for putting herself in danger to make a point was not amusing at all.
It was vivid. Necessary. My palm itched with the urge to introduce her to consequences she could not outthink.
“You are the sort of woman who would run toward danger if you thought it gave you leverage in an argument,” I said.
“I am the sort of woman who doesn’t like being handled.”
“You have never been handled properly.”
The line left my mouth before I decided to allow it.
The silence that followed was different.
Charged.
Hot.
Even through the phone, I felt her stillness.
Interesting…
“That,” she said quietly, “was a very dangerous thing to say.”
“Yes.”
“Do you make a habit of dangerous statements?”
“Only with you.”
Her breath stilled and my grip tightened around the pen. There was my tell. There was the quiet little proof that beneath the fury and suspicion, beneath the analysis and the knives and the locked doors, she felt the same current I did.
Good.
“Ivan,” she said.
“Kit.”
“If you think telling me you’re Bratva and then issuing orders is going to make me docile, you picked the wrong woman.”
“I do not want you docile.”
“No?”
“No.”
“What do you want?”
Everything.
The word filled my chest so completely that for a moment, I could not speak.
Her mouth against mine. Her body under my hands. Her trust, fought for and earned in teeth and fire. Her anger. Her brilliance. Her sleep, her food, her safety, her surrender when she chose it, and her defiance when she needed to test whether I was strong enough to handle it.
I wanted everything.
“I want you alive,” I said.
It was true, but it didn’t even begin to explain what I felt.
“I’m not stopping the Orlov investigation,” she said.
My jaw tightened.
There was the stubborn little girl I was going to spank until she learned that bravery and self-destruction were not the same thing.
“Yes,” I said. “You are.”
“No. I’m not.”
“For tonight, you are.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“For tonight, I do.”
Her laugh this time was soft, incredulous, and so heated beneath the anger that I had to look away from the monitor.
“You really believe that.”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re Bratva?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Because you are mine and I am done pretending the word is not sitting in my mouth every time I say your name.
“Because I am the only person between you and Mikhail Orlov’s men tonight,” I said. “And because you are too intelligent to mistake pride for strategy when I put it that plainly.”
She went quiet.
I did not enjoy needing to wound her pride.