Chapter 19 #2
My throat tightened. “You understand,” I said slowly, “that any reasonable woman would leave right now.”
“Yes.”
“Any smart woman would probably stab you first.”
“Yes.”
“I have a knife in my bag.”
“I know.”
My mouth twisted. “Of course you do.”
He waited, the silence taking over the room.
I should have walked out. I didn’t. It wasn’t because I forgave him.
I did not. It wasn’t because I trusted him either.
I stayed because Mikhail Orlov had my name, Daniel’s archive was sitting on the desk, and buried somewhere inside old money routes and newer lies was the reason my brother had disappeared.
I had not come this far to stop because of what Ivan Morozov had done.
“You don’t get forgiveness tonight,” I said.
His gaze remained steady. “I did not expect it.”
“I’ll deal with all of this and you later.”
“Yes.”
“I mean that.”
“I know.”
His response should have made me angrier. It didn’t though. Maybe because this time, he had earned the right to know exactly how much trouble he was in.
I reached for the pen and he went very still. I picked it up, looked at it once, then set it beside my laptop. Not back in his reach or quite in mine either, but between us, a little bit closer to me. That was the only mercy he was getting.
Then I opened Daniel’s file.
Last known timeline. His car near the Mystic aquarium. Blood on the steering wheel.
Witness statement one, with the Russian accent.
Witness statement two, without it.
Daniel’s last text to me printed from an old phone backup because I could not stand keeping it only in digital form.
Then I kept looking because that was what I did. Ivan became peripheral. The apartment, the monitors, the pen, the sting still lingering beneath my legging—all of it moved one step back because Daniel’s file had always known how to take the center of a room.
I opened the archive from the drive, then the old note I had taken from my apartment. Daniel’s handwriting looked different on the screen when I scanned it in, too neat somehow and beneath a column of old entity names, he had circled one I had never been able to place.
Seaport Meridian Holdings.
I pulled the current Orlov map onto one monitor and moved Ivan’s cleaned file aside without asking permission and he let me.
Wise man.
Seaport Meridian had been inactive for years. That was why I had never loved it as a lead. Registered, moved money twice, disappeared, dissolved into three successor entities that led nowhere useful, but Ivan’s map had a Seaport branch. When I searched it, I found Meridian Harbor Services.
Ivan leaned closer.
“These are connected,” he said.
I did not look at him. “Show me.”
He moved to his own machine and pulled a corporate filing record onto the right monitor, then a property transfer, then an old port services permit. Light digital work. Nothing showy. Nothing that needed explanation beyond the documents themselves.
Seaport Meridian Holdings had dissolved seven years ago.
Three months before Daniel vanished.
One of its successor entities held a minority stake in a port services company that later became Meridian Harbor Services.
Meridian Harbor Services had one small contract tied to a Boston Seaport warehouse.
A warehouse Daniel had visited six days before he disappeared.
I knew that because it was in his mileage log, a line the police had dismissed as work-related and uninteresting.
My hands went cold.
“Kit,” he said.
“No.”
“You don’t know what I am about to say.”
“Yes, I do.”
He was going to tell me not to let the new connection make me reckless, and he would be right.
I hated that.
“I’m not running,” I said.
“I didn’t expect you to.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“I can see that too.”
“I’m looking.”
“Then look very carefully.”
The words were quiet. There was no command or even a hint of Daddy in his voice, no attempt to soften what had happened between us with the dynamic I had not yet decided whether to keep or burn to the ground.
So we kept working. At some point, he set coffee beside me. I did not thank him, but I drank it anyway.
At midnight, we found the first clear overlap.
Daniel’s warehouse visit coincided with a transfer through Seaport Meridian’s successor entity.
In the records, it was listed as a consulting payment with the label archival services.
Shortly thereafter, we found the second overlap.
The same warehouse had been subleased, briefly, to a company tied to one of Mikhail Orlov’s older Boston conduits.
Sometime later, we found the third. A man listed on the port services permit had given a witness statement in Daniel’s case.
The bartender who had first mentioned a Russian accent and then forgotten all about it.
My vision narrowed. I pulled the statement up, then the permit, then the signatures.
They were all signed by the same man.
Mikhail Orlov.
I sat with his name on the screen for a moment.
Seven years of red string and cold files and the specific, private grief of someone who had kept looking past the point where looking made practical sense. Seven years of Mikhail Orlov as a shape I could prove by what moved around it but never directly touch.
His signature was right there.
He had not hidden it. He had buried it under enough corporate language to assume it would never resurface. He had been so certain of that assumption he had not even bothered to scrub the name from the permit.
My hands were very still on the keyboard.
For the first time in seven years, Daniel’s disappearance did not feel like a cold file. It felt like a door I was about to open.
Ivan’s voice came from beside me.
“Kit.”
I did not look away from the screen.
“If you tell me to stop, I will throw this laptop at you.”
“I was not going to tell you to stop.”
“What were you going to say?”
“That you did it.”