Chapter 25
Kit
Mikhail Orlov was arrested on a Tuesday.
The federal indictment itself was forty-seven pages and covered financial crimes, conspiracy, and obstruction charges.
The warrant was executed at his Boston residence at six-seventeen in the morning, which I knew because I was awake at six-seventeen in the morning, which I had been most mornings for the past week, sitting at Ivan’s desk with my desktop running beside his machines and a coffee that was, for once, not cold.
He was going to prison for the rest of his life.
The network was not dead. Networks like the Orlov family’s didn’t die from the arrest of one man. Instead, they fractured, rearranged themselves, and eventually either found new leadership or cannibalized themselves. Maxim’s people were watching every single one of those threads.
Viktor Sokolov’s trust structure had been folded into the indictment as well, Aleksei’s quiet work on the paper trail giving federal investigators exactly what they needed to dismantle it.
Daniel’s name appeared in the indictment on page thirty-one, under the obstruction count.
He wasn’t the centerpiece—that would come later, in a separate proceeding, when the authorization chain had been fully documented by the federal team—but it was there.
His name. In a federal document. On the record.
I sat with that for a while.
Seven years. I had been running for seven years, and for the first time since the blood on his steering wheel I was not running toward anything.
I was just sitting at my desk with a coffee that was the right temperature, and somewhere in a federal document my brother was no longer only missing.
He was a name attached to a crime attached to a man who was going to answer for it.
I had made peace, long ago, with the likelihood that I would never have a body to bury—only a name on a record that would not disappear, and that, I had decided, would have to be enough.
It was not the same as having him back. I knew that. I had always known it.
But it was something.
It was his name on a record that would not disappear. It was, in the specific and limited and real way of justice, enough.
Then I got up, made a second coffee, and went back to work, because that was what I did and Daniel would have understood it.
That had been four days ago.
The week had been a little complicated though.
Living in Ivan Morozov’s apartment was not difficult in the logistical sense.
My apartment lease was up at the end of the month, and I had already decided not to renew it.
His apartment was large enough. My desktop had been set up beside his machines, the two systems co-existing with the peaceful professionalism of equipment that did not have opinions about the arrangement even if the people operating it did.
We argued about methodology constantly. About approach, about sequencing, about how to handle the secondary Orlov network now that Mikhail was in custody.
Ivan was patient in the way that was most infuriating, which was the way that acknowledged my point and then held his position anyway, and I was patient in the way that was probably also infuriating, which was the way that made clear I had heard him and still believed I was correct.
We were good at our work for the same reasons, and those reasons made us difficult to compromise with.
We were also, seven days in, not arguing only about work.
I had been testing him.
I had been testing him on purpose, not accidentally, not because I was overwhelmed, confused, or acting out of some unexamined impulse, but because I wanted to know what he would do.
I had been testing him in small ways all week.
A decision made unilaterally that I had then told him about.
A line of argument pushed an hour past reasonable.
A task he had asked me to leave for the morning, completed at midnight, loudly, with the kitchen light on.
Each time he had responded with varying degrees of his particular patience, a word, a look, once a hand at the back of my neck that had communicated a great deal without saying anything at all and each time, I had filed the response and noted it and understood that I was calibrating.
Today I had stopped calibrating.
Today I had taken a meeting with the federal investigator handling the Mikhail indictment. Alone. At a location I had chosen. Without telling Ivan I was going.
It was not the same as before when I had slipped out because I was constitutionally incapable of sitting still while someone else managed something for me. I had not been thinking about what he would do. I had been thinking about the drive.
Today I had thought about what he would do for approximately the full forty minutes of the meeting and the full rideshare back to the apartment and the full thirty seconds I stood in the entry before I opened the door.
I opened the door. He was at his desk, but he did not turn around.
“How was the meeting?” he said.
I set my bag down.
“Useful,” I said. “Hendricks is moving faster than I expected. The authorization chain is going to be central to the second indictment, which means Daniel’s case gets—”
“Kit.”
I stopped.
He turned around then. He looked at me for a moment. Then his eyes went to my bag. Then back to my face.
“You know what you did,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” I said.
The room was quiet.
“Was it necessary?”
I thought about it honestly. “The meeting was. The going alone was—” I held his gaze. “I wanted to see what you would do.”
“You know what I’m going to do,” he said.
“Maybe a little,” I said.
He stood and moved to the bedroom with the same unhurried certainty he moved everywhere.
He did not need to tell me to follow. I followed because I was choosing to follow, which was the entire point, which was what seven days and a week of small tests and a forty-minute meeting with a federal investigator had been building toward.
I closed the bedroom door behind me.
He was standing at the foot of the bed. His jacket was already off.
His eyes were on me with the full, patient weight of his attention, and he reached for his belt with the same intentional calm quality he brought to everything that mattered, the buckle coming free, the leather sliding through the loops with a sound that I was going to be thinking about for a considerable amount of time and had already decided I was not going to examine too carefully yet.
He folded it once and then he looked at me.
“You’re going to get Daddy’s belt, little girl, and it’s going to sting a great deal,” he said.
“Yes, Daddy,” I said.
Clearly. In my own voice. My own choice.
He nodded once, the way he nodded when something had been correctly understood.
“Bend over the bed, little girl.”
I did.
The position was different from the first time.
I was not across his knee. I was braced against the bed with my forearms flat on the duvet and my hips at the edge.
His hand came to the waistband of my jeans.
Then my underwear. He took both down together, efficiently, leaving them at mid-thigh, and the cool air of the apartment was a specific and immediate reminder of exactly how exposed I was.
I was also, I noted with my characteristic tendency toward honest self-assessment, very aroused.
I had been for approximately the last forty minutes because I had known that I would come home, and I’d known that my daddy would spank me for being naughty and that was the single most arousing thing I’d ever experienced in my life.
I heard the belt swish through the air before it landed.
I pressed my forehead into the duvet and breathed through the hot sting.
It was not the same as his hand. His hand was warm and immediate and left a specific blooming sting that built and receded in waves.
The belt was different. It was sharper, more linear, a stripe of heat that sat on the skin differently, concentrated and hot and significantly more difficult to outpace with argument or analysis.
It landed again.
I yelped and gripped the duvet, and the belt began to fall faster.
He was methodical about it the way he was methodical about everything, with full attention and no wasted motion.
He did not rush and he did not ask me if I was all right because he already knew that I was, the same way he always already knew, and the knowing was its own specific kind of thing that I had stopped resenting and started being grateful for somewhere around day three of living in this apartment.
The belt came down again and again and I stopped counting, cataloguing, and doing anything that resembled analysis.
I pressed my face into the duvet, felt the heat building across my bottom, and thought about nothing except the specific, present reality of being here, in this room, having chosen this, with this man.
It was the most present I had been in seven years.
Possibly longer.
At some point—I had lost track of how many times the belt fell—the tears came, real ones, the kind I had been very careful about for years, the kind that came when you ran out of infrastructure to contain them.
They came quietly and I did not try to stop them because stopping them would have required reassembling the infrastructure and I had chosen, intentionally, to leave it down tonight.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I cried out into the duvet.
The belt finally stilled and his hand came to my lower back, warm and comforting.
“There’s my good girl,” he said.
The heat across my bottom was significant. The stripes would be visible tomorrow and possibly the day after and I had absolutely no objection to that.
I waited, my face still pressed to the bed.
When he finally spoke again, his voice was lower.
“You understand why Daddy spanked you, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Tell me.”
I swallowed and my voice was rough when I answered. “Because I didn’t tell you about the meeting.”