Page 112 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“No. It is accurate.”

Her throat moved and she looked away, toward the kitchen, toward the window, toward anything that was not my face at close range.

I let her.

There was no need to press. I had the thing I had needed, which was not her compliance. I had never wanted her compliance, I had wanted her actual attention, which was different and harder to get and worth considerably more. She had given me that. She had called me Daddy and meant it, which was not a small thing for a woman who treated every word as a resource to be managed.

She was mine. She did not know the full shape of that yet.

But she would.

Soon.

* * *

We went back to work.

Some men, in some stories, would have made the moment into something. Would have required the softness to last, the vulnerability to be performed for longer than it had naturally run. Kit was not built for extended softness, and I was not interested in manufacturing it. What I was interested in was the two of us, shoulder to shoulder at the desk, her with the drive shehad gone back for and me with the Orlov feed, working together. She sat a bit gingerly, but she did not remark on it.

I did not remark on it either, but I was aware of the small, controlled way she shifted her weight when she reached for her coffee, the fractional adjustment when she settled deeper into the chair. I was aware of it the way I was aware of everything about her. Completely. Without comment.

She had pulled her hair back up before she sat down. She hadn’t used a pen this time. Instead, she used a band she had found in her bag, which was practical and efficient and entirely her, and which meant something only in the specific context of a woman reassembling herself after having been carefully taken apart.

I watched her work.

I watched her the way I had always watched her—with the full weight of attention I had never had to pretend was professional—and now I did it openly, because she had named me, and the naming was a door that did not close again.

Once, she caught me.

She turned from the secondary monitor and found my eyes already on her, and for one second the air in the room thinned. Her jaw set. She looked back at the screen, but this time, she did not tell me to stop.

I deeply enjoyed that.

CHAPTER 19

Kit

I lasted two hours before the world reminded me that no room was safe just because Ivan Morozov was in it.

That was unfair.

It was also accurate.

His apartment had settled into a quiet that should not have felt comfortable. The monitors glowed against the dark glass of the windows, Boston stretched below us in long wet lines of traffic and shadow, and Ivan sat three feet away at the desk with his sleeves rolled to his forearms and his glasses low on the bridge of his nose. He looked composed again, which was deeply offensive considering I was still sitting very carefully because he’d spanked my ass bright red in his apartment less than three hours ago.

My body had opinions about that. My pride had more. Neither of them was particularly useful right now, so I ignored both and kept working. At that moment, I did not feel normal. I did notfeel fine. I felt raw in places that had nothing to do with my stinging bottom. Ivan had kissed me. Then he had put me over his knee and given me the first real spanking of my life. He had made me say I was sorry. He had touched me afterward and I’d come really fucking hard. Then he had called me brave. And I’d called him Daddy.

I did not know what to do with any of that.

So I did what I always did. I opened files. Daniel’s archive sat on the temporary drive beside my laptop. I hadn’t opened it yet. I told myself I was sequencing the work properly, which was true if I squinted and ignored the fact that I was stalling. The Orlov map was up on Ivan’s center monitor. My laptop held a narrow cross-reference of shell entities tied to Boston properties, Seaport subsidiaries, and two old names I had found in Daniel’s notes years ago but never been able to connect to anything still alive.

Ivan did not rush me, which annoyed me too. He did not hover. Did not ask why I hadn’t opened the archive. Did not tell me to breathe, eat, sleep, sit differently, or stop pretending the bite of the couch cushion through my leggings wasn’t making my eyes narrow every time I shifted, which he noticed because that was just him, but he let me have the silence. For a while, that almost seemed to settle me.

Then my laptop gave one soft chime and my hands stilled over the keys. Ivan’s did not. Instead, he kept working on his own machine, gaze steady on his monitor, one hand moving across the trackpad with the same calm energy he brought to everything.

Maybe he didn’t hear it.

No. That couldn’t be right. Ivan heard everything.