Chapter 15
Ivan
Mikhail Orlov’s people had her name by the time I finished pretending coffee had been about coffee.
Her name sat in an Orlov analyst’s report like someone’s dirty hands had touched it, and for a moment, everything in me went quiet enough to become dangerous.
I stood in my apartment with the lights dimmed low, the air cold, and her cheap blue pen between my fingers.
The one I had taken from her desk. I turned it once, slowly, as I read the translated note on the monitor.
Source identified: Kit Calloway. Freelance cybersecurity consultant. Boston. Address attached. Physical confirmation pending. Move within twenty-four hours.
Someone competent had entered the Orlov operation and that annoyed me most after the threat itself.
Until now, Mikhail’s digital people had been good enough to be inconvenient but not good enough to frighten me, but this new hand had corrected my false trail faster than expected.
He had looked at Kara Caldwell and asked the one question I had not wanted him to ask.
Why is she so convenient?
Competent men were tedious. Competent men near Kit were unacceptable.
I set the pen down before I snapped it in half.
On the fourth monitor, Kit’s building sat in grainy exterior footage, the front light glowing above the door like a small insult to every line I had already crossed.
Her windows were dark. She was inside, according to the movement patterns I still told myself were necessary to monitor, though even that lie had become thin enough to see through.
She had gone home after coffee and worked late because that was just who she was.
I had warned her. She had heard me and she had filed the warning somewhere in that brilliant, stubborn head of hers and then done exactly what I knew she would do.
She kept digging.
That was the thing about Kit. She did not confuse fear with instruction. A sane man would have admired that from a distance, but I was not sane where she was concerned. Not anymore.
I had known it at the café, sitting across from her while she tested me with a false statement about her own work and waited to see if I would correct her.
I had watched the little trap slide across the table between us, neat and quiet and so very Kit that my cock had stirred beneath the table before I had any right to feel anything except professional concern. She had wanted to see if I would bite.
I hadn’t.
Instead, I had asked the question that proved I knew the premise was wrong and let her notice. Her eyes had flashed with understanding. Her mouth had tightened around a smile she did not give me. She had filed me away.
Good girl.
The thought came now with heat.
She needed a man patient enough not to correct every mistake the second she made it, but firm enough to stop her when correction became survival.
She needed someone who could sit across from her and let her test the edges of his control without taking it personally.
Someone who would feed her when she forgot she had a body, take the laptop out of her hands when exhaustion became a weapon she aimed at herself, lock the doors she missed, and put her over his knee when she decided danger was acceptable as long as she could name it first.
My hand flexed.
Daddy will take care of you, little ghost hunter.
My body reacted hard enough that I had to close my eyes for a second.
This was not the time. Except it was all the time now.
Wanting her was no longer a separate problem from keeping her alive.
It had fused somewhere between the first anomaly and the way she said my name in the café.
I wanted her safe with the same vicious intensity I wanted her naked.
I wanted her breathing under my protection, furious and eventually pliant under my firm hand, curled up in my bed, fed, watched, held, disciplined when she needed it, and praised when she earned it.
She needed a daddy.
That word should have sounded ridiculous in the cold light of my apartment with Orlov muscle moving toward her address.
It did not. It sounded inevitable.
I was going to be her daddy.
First, though, I had to keep her alive long enough for her to hate me properly.
So I made a false trail where a fake Kit Calloway checked into a Chicago hotel that existed, under a reservation created through a card that would survive a shallow investigation and fail only after I wanted it to.
Within the hour, Mikhail’s people believed their Boston address had gone cold because their target had moved.
I didn’t make her disappear. I just moved her. A moving target created urgency and sloppy decisions. A vanished one created suspicion. I gave them urgency.
Then I gave them something to chase.
I had bought Kit another window, but I knew that it was smaller than the last one. That fact sat beneath my ribs like a blade turned sideways.
When I got back to the Iron Wolf, Sergei was waiting in the back hallway.
He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, expression flat, green eyes awake in the dim amber light.
The tavern was closed, the main room quiet except for the low hum of the refrigerators behind the bar and the occasional creak of old wood settling.
In that silence, Sergei looked less like a brother and more like judgment that had learned to stand upright.
“You still going at this alone,” he said.
“Good morning to you as well.”
“It is not morning.”
“It is after three. That is morning for responsible criminals.”
His eyes moved over my coat, my gloves, the small black case in my hand. “Orlov?”
I did not answer.
His mouth tightened by one degree. “Ivan.”
“I handled it.”
“That is what you say before things stop being handled.”
“Usually I say it during.”
“You think this is funny?”
“No.” I removed my gloves slowly. “I think if I stop making jokes, I will start killing people before I have decided where to put the bodies.”
Sergei was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Do they have her name?”
I looked at him. There was no point lying to Sergei now. He had already built half the truth all by himself. Another lie would insult us both.
“Yes.”
His expression tensed just a hair. “How long?”
“Twenty-four hours before they move physically. Perhaps less if the new analyst is better than I think.”
“And is he?”
I thought of the corrected trail, the timing, the careful way the new hand had stopped trusting the data when it tasted too sweet.
“Yes.”
Sergei pushed away from the wall. “Maxim needs to know.”
“He will.”
“When?”
“When I have her somewhere he cannot turn her into a family problem before she understands what is happening.”
“She is already a family problem.”
“No,” I said, and the word came much more harshly than I intended. “She is mine.”
Silence followed. Sergei looked at me the way he did when a target finally admitted the important thing out loud. I held his gaze. There was no taking it back now, but I did not want to.
Finally, he said, “Then stop treating her like a secret you can manage.”
“I am calling her.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“She will not like what you tell her.”
“She does not have to like it.”
Sergei’s eyes narrowed faintly. “That sounds like Maxim.”
“Insulting.”
“That was not an insult.”
“It should have been.”
He very nearly smiled. Then his expression hardened again. “If you need men outside her building—”
“No.”
“If Orlov moves—”
“They won’t reach her door.”
“Pride,” he said quietly, “is a bad perimeter.”
I sighed. I hated when my brothers were right. It happened more often than any of us deserved.
“I can’t help but protect her myself,” I said.
Sergei looked at me for a long moment, then nodded once. “Call her. Then call me.”
He walked away before I could answer, leaving me alone in the back hallway with my phone in my hand and Kit’s number on my screen.
She had given it to me after coffee without making it look like a concession. One message sent to the number on my card, no greeting, no softness, no unnecessary punctuation.
Now I pressed call. She answered on the fourth ring. I knew it wasn’t because she was asleep, but because she was deciding whether to pick up or not.
“Morozov,” she said.
My name in her voice at three-thirty in the morning did something to me I did not have time to indulge.
“Kit.”
A pause.
“Nothing good starts with that tone.”
“Are you in your apartment?”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
“Door locked?”
“Excuse me?”
“Door. Locked.”
“You called me at three in the morning to check my deadbolt?”
“No.”
“Then try again.”
There she was. My palm twitched again, and this time the imagined crack of my hand against her ass came with such vivid force that my cock hardened beneath my trousers.
She would glare over her shoulder, outraged and breathless.
She would accuse me of being impossible.
I would tell her impossible girls earned impossible consequences when they ignored danger just because no one had ever held them accountable.
Focus.
“Lock it,” I said.
I heard the sound of her breath catching in her throat.
“You don’t give me orders.”
“Not usually.”
“Not ever.”
“Tonight is different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
Something moved on her end of the line. A chair, maybe. Then footsteps. She was not obeying. She was checking. Good. Suspicious girl. Difficult girl. My girl.
I heard the faint click of a lock. Then another.
Good.
My voice lowered before I could stop it. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me like I did it for you.”
I almost smiled.
Twenty-four hours.
The smile died.
“The conference was not a coincidence,” I said.
She was silent on the other line.
“I know,” she said.
“You suspected.”
“Don’t split hairs with me at three in the morning. I suspected enough.”
“I engineered the introduction through Mara.”
“I figured that part out.”
I closed my eyes briefly. I should have known she had.
“What part haven’t I figured out?” she asked.
“The part where Mikhail Orlov’s people have your name and address.”