Chapter 24
Ivan
Kit drank coffee at my window in nothing but my shirt, and for the first time in longer than I cared to examine, the city below my apartment felt like it could wait.
I stood behind her, one arm around her waist, my other hand braced lightly at her hip.
She had allowed the hold without comment.
That was not a small thing. Kit could argue with a locked door and make the door feel intellectually inferior.
Letting me hold her in silence while morning came up over Boston was trust in a language she did not yet want to admit she spoke.
I rested my mouth against the back of her head. She leaned back against me by a fraction and I felt it everywhere.
“Don’t be smug,” she said.
“I was very restrained.”
“That sounded smug.”
“It was factual.”
She made a soft sound into her coffee that was not quite a laugh and not quite surrender. I had already learned to be grateful for her almosts. Almost laughter. Almost softness. Almost rest. With Kit, almost was not hesitation. It was a door she opened a crack and dared me not to force wider.
So I did not.
We stayed there until she finished her coffee, until the light changed from gray to pale gold, until her fingers loosened around the mug and her shoulders stopped sitting so close to her ears.
Then she turned in my arms, looked up at me with sleep still smudged at the edges of her eyes, and said, “We have work.”
Of course we did.
My girl had been naked in my bed only hours earlier, warm and responsive beneath my hands, and still woke ready to fight.
I wanted to take her back to bed. I wanted to put her under the covers, lock the world out, and spend the next twelve hours proving to her that there were better uses for adrenaline than survival and working yourself to the bone.
But Mikhail Orlov was moving assets, Daniel Calloway’s evidence was loaded inside a timed release, and Kit’s mind had already begun turning.
“Then we work,” I said.
She studied me as if she expected argument, but I gave her none, which almost seemed to irritate her more.
Good.
I liked her awake.
We returned to the desk with coffee, two laptops, Daniel’s folder, and the quiet knowledge that the shape of the day had already been decided.
The release was scheduled for noon. Mikhail had done exactly what Kit and I expected him to do.
He moved. He shifted ownership chains, transferred signing authority, burned old shells, and tried to bury the asset movement inside a dozen harmless-looking corporate adjustments.
Kit had caught the first tremor before I did.
She had placed a secondary tracker inside the Seaport subsidiary, a small, elegant thing tucked where the old records crossed the new structure.
She did not tell me until it flagged the movement, and when I looked at her, she lifted one shoulder with the faintest edge of satisfaction.
“You’re not the only one who plans ahead,” she said.
“No,” I replied. “You are simply the prettier one.”
That earned me a real smile she tried to hide.
We tightened the release together. Kit reviewed the language one more time.
I checked the evidence packet. She added two names on the recipient list. I confirmed that the asset movement Mikhail had triggered would be visible in the first wave.
She rewrote one sentence about Daniel because my version, in her words, “sounded like a man trying not to feel anything.”
By ten-thirty, she yawned for the third time in seven minutes.
The first two, I ignored out of mercy.
The third, I shut her laptop halfway.
Her eyes snapped to mine. “Do not.”
“You need sleep.”
“I slept.”
“You slept some. Then you woke up and immediately tried to dismantle an empire in my shirt.”
“It’s a good shirt.”
“It is an excellent shirt. You are still going to take a nap.”
“Ivan.”
The warning in her voice was sharp enough to draw blood from a lesser man.
I leaned back in my chair and looked at her properly.
She was beautiful like this, though beauty was too fragile a word for the sight of her in my clothes with her hair pinned messily off her face and that stubborn intelligence still burning through exhaustion.
My shirt fell to mid-thigh on her, loose at the collar, one sleeve slipping down her arm.
Beneath the hem, she was completely bare.
The thought tightened my body.
It also softened something in me.
She belonged in my shirt. In my apartment. Near my desk. Wrapped in my blanket, drinking the coffee I made, glaring at me like every inch of care was an argument she intended to win.
“You can fight me,” I said. “Or you can nap.”
“I pick the secret third option.”
“There is no secret third option.”
“There’s always a secret third option.”
“Do you need a spanking first?”
Her eyes flashed.
There she was.
“Maybe I do,” she said.
A beat of silence passed between us.
Then I stood.
Kit’s chin lifted immediately. Pride first. Always. Even in my shirt, barefoot, tired enough to sway slightly when she pushed back from the desk. Especially then.
I went to her slowly, then I closed one hand gently around her arm. I drew her close, then used one hand to lift the hem of my shirt at the back and set my other hand on her bare bottom.
“Ivan,” she whispered.
“Last chance to be reasonable.”
“I hate reasonable.”
“Yes,” I said, and brought my hand down.
The smack cracked sharply through the quiet room. Kit jolted, her hands grabbing at the front of my shirt, eyes wide with surprise and heat.
I gave her another, just as firm, over the other cheek.
Then a third.
It wasn’t a punishment like the night before.
This was a reminder. A short, clear correction delivered to an already sore girl who knew exactly what she was inviting.
Her bottom flushed brighter under my palm, the pink deepening beautifully against her pale skin, and she made a small sound that went straight through me.
I gave her a few more, each one hard enough to settle the question.
She pressed her forehead against my chest. “Okay, okay, Daddy. I’ll be a good girl.”
The words went through me with more force than they should have after so little sleep.
I let the shirt fall back into place and smoothed my palm over the fabric once, soothing where I had stung her. “Yes,” I said quietly. “You will.”
She muttered something against my chest that sounded very much like ‘tyrant.’
I kissed the top of her head. “Bed.”
“I’m going.”
“No. You are being carried.”
She lifted her head to glare at me. “You are enjoying this too much.”
“I am enjoying it exactly the correct amount.”
“That is a lie.”
“Yes.”
Her glare softened and I lifted her before she could decide whether to keep arguing. She made a token sound of objection, but her arms went around my neck, and by the time I carried her into the bedroom, her cheek had come to rest against my shoulder.
The bed still smelled faintly of her from the night before. I laid her down on her side, mindful of her sore bottom, and pulled the blanket over her. She tried to sit up once. I put two fingers gently to the center of her forehead and guided her back to the pillow.
Her eyes narrowed. “That was incredibly patronizing.”
“That was incredibly effective.”
“Don’t sit there and watch me sleep.”
“I’m going to sit here until you fall asleep.”
“That is what I said.”
“No, you told me not to.”
“I implied it.”
“You are too tired to imply things accurately.”
She huffed, but she did not try to rise again.
Then I sat on the edge of the bed and ran my hand through her hair, slow strokes from her temple back over the crown of her head.
The fight in her lasted another minute, maybe two.
Then her eyes began to close despite her efforts to keep them wide open. A few breaths later, she was asleep.
I sat there longer than necessary, my hand still resting lightly near her hair, and looked at her in the morning quiet. She wore my shirt. Her bare legs were tucked beneath my blanket. Her bottom, hidden now, would still be pink from my hand. My cock twitched at the thought.
At 11:40, I left her sleeping and returned to the desk.
Noon came without drama.
The release went out through the channels we had chosen together.
Daniel Calloway’s evidence, the Seaport financial chain, the warehouse records, the witness conflict, the authorization line tying Mikhail to the disappearance.
The first article broke at 12:18. The second feed picked it up six minutes later with enough independent language to show they had already begun verifying.
By 12:31, the financial chain connecting Mikhail Orlov to Daniel Calloway’s disappearance was public.
By 12:47, it was in the hands of the public.
Mikhail was not going to recover from it. I watched both feeds for several minutes, then looked toward the bedroom.
She deserved to see it.
She also deserved twenty more minutes of sleep.
Daddy chose sleep.
I made coffee.
When I carried the mug into the bedroom, she had not moved except to curl one hand beneath her cheek. I set the coffee on the nightstand where she would smell it when she woke. Then I went back to the desk and checked the deeper movement Mikhail had triggered during the first public wave.
That was when I first saw the Volkov name.
At first, it looked like nothing. An old payment path buried so deep in dead records that most analysts would have dismissed it as historical noise and moved on.
Money had moved through a defunct shell company I recognized by structure before I recognized the name, then through two dead accounts, then into an entity tied to the Volkov family.
I stopped moving.
There are names a man reads. There are names a man remembers. And then there are names that reach across years and put the smell of smoke back in his throat.