Page 145 of Hunt Me, Daddy

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.