Page 124 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“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 lapbefore 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.”