Chapter 21
Kit
I woke up with my cheek pressed to a pillow that smelled like Ivan Morozov and my hand curled beneath my chin like I’d been trying to hold on to sleep with my fingers.
For several seconds, I had no idea where I was.
Then the ceiling resolved. It was smooth white and there was no water stain above the corner, no hairline crack near the window, no old pipes muttering behind plaster.
The room was too quiet, too expensive, and way too put together.
Light came in through dark curtains in thin gray seams, and somewhere beyond the half-open door, Ivan was working out there.
I was in Ivan’s apartment.
In Ivan’s bed.
With Ivan’s blanket tucked around my shoulders.
I went very still. He had carried me to bed, but he had not stayed, which felt far more intimate than a kiss.
I stared at the slice of hallway visible through the open door and let my body catch up to the morning.
Exhaustion still dragged at me, but the vicious edge of it had softened.
My head ached faintly. My mouth tasted like stale coffee and old grief.
My bottom still stung when I shifted, a warm, humiliating reminder of Ivan’s hand and my own debatably questionable choices.
I pushed the blanket back and sat up slowly. My body protested, and I winced before I could stop myself. Then I glared at no one, because glaring at pain had historically provided mixed results but remained emotionally satisfying.
The apartment outside the bedroom was dim in the early morning, monitors casting blue-white light across the desk.
Ivan sat exactly where I had last seen him, though he looked like he had not moved much since.
His shirtsleeves were still rolled up, and I look a long moment to admire the muscles in his forearms.
He looked up before I made a sound.
“You slept four hours and eleven minutes,” he said.
I leaned against the doorframe. “Good morning to you too, stalker Daddy.”
His mouth moved faintly. “Good morning.”
“Did you sleep?”
“No.”
“Shocking.”
“You would have woken if I came in.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I looked at the screens instead.
“What did you do?”
Ivan turned one monitor toward me.
“Built the revenge you need.”
My stomach went cold and hot at the same time.
I crossed to the desk. He did not stand.
Did not crowd me. Did not touch me. The space he left was intentional and almost cruel in its restraint, because now I knew what his hands felt like when he did not hold back, and the absence of them almost felt a bit wrong.
The timed release was not flashy. I appreciated that.
It was clean, structured, and labeled clearly enough that my half-rested brain could follow it without wanting to commit violence against the interface.
Daniel’s evidence had been packaged into a release bundle, with the Seaport chain, the witness conflict, the warehouse documents, the old payment routes, and the authorization thread all tied together in a way that would survive more than one kind of scrutiny.
The recipient list made my eyebrows rise. It included law enforcement, three journalists whose names I recognized because they still had spines, several financial regulators, and two rival Bratva families.
I looked at Ivan and he looked back at me calmly.
“You included rival families.”
“Yes.”
“Subtle.”
“Effective.”
“Dangerous.”
“Yes.”
“Honest answer. I’m going to need caffeine before I decide what to do with this.”
He reached to the side without looking and set a mug beside me. The first sip was just as glorious as I hoped it would be.
I pointed at the screen. “Summarize it for me.”
He did.
The release would send Daniel’s evidence automatically if not manually cancelled every seventy-two hours. Nothing had been armed without my final review. Every recipient could be changed. Every file could be edited. He had built the framework while I slept, but he had left the switch dark.
Waiting.
For me.
We spent the next hour reviewing. I changed two recipients.
Added one journalist Daniel had trusted before he vanished.
Rewrote the summary because Ivan’s version was accurate but too cold, and Daniel deserved better than to become a clean paragraph in someone else’s war.
Ivan watched me edit it, but he did not interfere.
When I was done, he read the final version once and nodded.
“That will do,” he said.
Ivan’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it and his expression tightened the tiniest bit.
“Your brothers?” I asked.
“Yes.”
My fingers tightened around the mug. He stood up and I expected him to leave the room, but he didn’t. Instead, he answered it right in front of me.
“Maxim.”
His brother’s voice came through too low for me to make out words, but not quiet enough to miss the tone. He sounded calm, intelligent, and dangerous.
Ivan listened for a long moment. Then he said, “I need to tell you everything before Orlov makes his move.” He paused for a moment and then continued.
“My source in the Orlov intrusion is Kit Calloway,” he began.
“She’s a freelance cybersecurity consultant in Boston.
She was originally contracted on an Orlov-adjacent financial investigation and continued independently after the contract ended. ”
A pause.
“Yes. Her name is the one I withheld.”
Another pause.
“No. She is not law enforcement. She is a civilian with a personal connection to an old Orlov action.”
My grip on the mug tightened. Ivan’s eyes stayed on mine.
“Daniel Calloway. Her brother. Mikhail authorized his death seven years ago through a Seaport subsidiary chain. We confirmed it last night.”
Silence.
Then Maxim again, louder this time, though still only thunder through the line.
Ivan did not flinch.
“No,” he said. “I did not bring it to you when I found her.”
There was a long silence after that. I could not hear Maxim’s words, but I could imagine them. Ivan’s face remained calm though.
“I had my reasons,” he said. “Some operational. Some personal.”
My pulse tripped.
“I am not minimizing it,” Ivan continued. “I am telling you I made the decision. If there are consequences, they are mine.”
I looked away first, not because I wanted to miss anything, but because the sudden pressure in my chest was not useful.
Ivan kept speaking.
“She is under my protection. Currently in my apartment. Orlov has her name and address. I redirected them to Chicago temporarily.”
A pause.
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“No. Do not send men here unless I ask.”
His jaw tightened.
“I understand what I said.”
The voice on the other end changed enough that even I could feel it through the room.
Ivan’s answer came quietly.
“Because if your men appear she will not respond well to that.”
I almost laughed because it was painfully, inconveniently accurate. He knew me too well. That was the problem and maybe not the problem.
“We have built a timed release,” Ivan said. “If Mikhail moves on her, the release will be very expensive for him.”
A long pause.
“No,” Ivan said. “I did not ask permission.”
The silence after that sentence was sharp enough to cut the room in half, but Ivan did not apologize.
“I am informing you now because this is no longer mine to contain alone,” he said. “And because if Mikhail chooses escalation, the Morozovs will be touched whether we like it or not.”
Maxim spoke again and Ivan listened for nearly a full minute.
Then he said, “Yes.”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
Then, lower, “I understand.”
He ended the call and for several seconds, neither of us moved. The apartment felt too quiet after Maxim’s voice disappeared. My computers hummed. The city shifted in pale daylight beyond the windows. My coffee had cooled in my hand.
“Is Maxim angry?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“At me or at you?”
Ivan set the phone down. “Me.”
“Because you hid me.”
“Yes.”
“Because of the release?”
“Yes.”
“Because you made decisions without him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a lot of yes.”
“It is that kind of morning.”
I looked at him. He stood with his shoulders relaxed, hands empty, face composed, but there was tension under the calm now.
“You’d go against your brother for this?” I asked.
His gaze lifted to mine.
“For this,” he said, “yes.”
The answer was not enough or maybe it was too easy. I needed more.
“For Daniel?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“For the Orlov investigation?”
“Yes.”
“For the release?”
“Yes.” His voice lowered. “I would go against my brother for you.”
I did not answer. I couldn’t. It wasn’t because I didn’t have words. I had too many, and none of them were safe enough to touch. So I picked up my coffee instead.
Cowardice tasted like cream and no sugar.
Ivan did not push me, which was how I knew he understood exactly what he had done. I let the sentence sit between us until it was something we had both agreed not to touch yet.
I assumed, when he started to walk, he was going for coffee or the secondary monitor or any of the thirty-seven operationally reasonable things a man might do with himself in the hours before sending an irreversible message to Mikhail Orlov.
I was already pulling the deployment window back up on the screen when his hand settled on my shoulder.
“Kit.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve said that four times today.”
“It’s remained accurate.”
His hand moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck. I went still in a way that was becoming reflexive and which I had stopped arguing with.
“Come here,” he said.
He drew me up from the chair, walked me to the couch with that unhurried purpose, and sat down and pulled me across his lap before I had finished deciding how I felt about it, which was also becoming somewhat reflexive and which I was choosing not to examine during active operations.
“Ivan, we have approximately forty minutes before—”
“I’m aware of how much time we have,” he said. “This won’t take forty minutes.”
He drew my leggings down. Then my underwear. Cool air, bare skin, the specific quality of being over his knee that my nervous system had developed strong and inconvenient opinions about.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I whined.
“I know, solnyshko, but sometimes even good girls need spankings too.”
Without another word, his palm landed, but it was somehow different from the time before. This time, it didn’t feel punishing or corrective in any way. Somehow, it felt good.
He worked steadily across both cheeks with the brisk efficiency that meant he was not interested in making a point, only in moving something through me that had been building all day and needed somewhere to go.
I pressed my face into the couch cushion and breathed.
It stung. That was the point. The sting was specific and immediate and demanded my complete attention. By the time his hand slowed I was warm everywhere and considerably quieter in my own head than I had been in quite some time.
Then his hand slid between my thighs.
He found that I was embarrassingly, thoroughly wet.
He did not comment on it. He simply found my clit and worked me with the same focused patience he brought to everything, two fingers crooked and his thumb precise and his attention complete, and I came with my face still pressed into the cushion and a sound I was not going to be cataloguing in any database any time soon.
He did not stop.
“Daddy—”
“One more,” he said.
It was not a request.
His fingers glided over my sensitive bundle of nerves and in no time at all, I was already at the edge of another orgasm. I tried to hold it off. I tried not to let him get to me, but his fingers were perfect and everything drove me closer to what was promising to be a delicious climax.
Then, all at once, the second one hit harder, and I screamed something into the cushion that was mostly his name and partly the other name and entirely undignified.
His hand stilled. His palm rested warm against the curve of my bottom, and he left it there for a moment before he helped me stand back up.
He looked at me.
My face was flushed. My thinking was considerably cleaner.
“Feel better?” he said.
“That’s a very smug question.”
“It wasn’t,” he said. “It was a genuine one.”
I held his gaze for a moment.
“Yes, Daddy,” I said, biting my lower lip. My cheeks felt red hot.
He nodded once, satisfied, and stood. I pulled up my panties and leggings and rubbed my bottom once, which earned me a very smug look from him and only made me blush even harder.
Then, we turned back to our computers because some truths needed somewhere to go before they became unbearable, and focused on the anonymous message we were about to send to Mikhail Orlov.
Stand down within 72 hours or everything releases.
I read the message three times.
Ivan stood beside me. “Once it goes,” he said, “he will know someone has the authorization chain.”
“He already knows someone’s been digging.”
“He will know how deep.”
“And if he thinks killing me stops it?”
“Then he has poor reading comprehension.”
I gave him a look and he almost smiled.
“He will understand the timer,” Ivan said.
“Will he stand down?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
I sat back. “No?”
“No.”
“Then why are we sending it?”
“To make him move.”
“You’re flushing him out,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t think to lead with that?”
“You would have seen it eventually.”
I narrowed my eyes because he was right.
“Ready?” he asked.
I looked at Daniel’s folder beside the keyboard and my heart squeezed tight.
“No,” I said.
Ivan waited and I took a breath.
“But yes.”
We sent the message together.
The countdown began. For the first minute, nothing happened.
For the second minute, still nothing. Ivan sat beside me, calm enough to be irritating and alert enough to be honest. I watched the screen because watching him felt too personal after what he had said, and because if I looked at Daniel’s file one more time, I might have to feel an emotion that was quickly becoming too large for the room.
At four minutes and thirty-two seconds, the first alert came in.
Ivan leaned forward slightly. I did too.
Mikhail was moving assets. Fast. Messy, for him or maybe this was what panic looked like when filtered through a man who had spent his life making other people bleed.
“He is not standing down,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“He is trying to move the vulnerable assets before the next cycle.”
“That seems like the opposite of compliance.”
“It is.”
“You were counting on it.”
Ivan turned his head toward me.
“Yes.”
I picked up my coffee again. My hand was steady. Ivan watched my face.
This time, I did not mind.
“Me too,” I said.