Page 116 of Hunt Me, Daddy

He was silent for one breath. Then another. “I wanted you to know someone had been there,” he said. “I wanted you looking for me.”

“That was cruel.”

“Yes.”

“You made me afraid in my own home.”

“I know,” he said.

“And you’ve been watching me all this time.”

“Yes.”

I lifted my gaze back to his, but he did not look away.

“The pen,” I said.

Ivan reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. For one insane second, I thought he might refuse. Then he took out the cheap blue ballpoint I had lost days ago and set it on the desk between us.

I stared at it for a long time. Longer than a pen deserved, but it wasn’t the pen, not really. It was my desk. My apartment. My mouth on the cap while I thought. His hand picking it up. His decision not to put it back. All the ways he had made himself intimate with my life before I had known his name.

“Why take it?” I asked.

His voice was lower when he answered. “Because it was yours.”

My throat tightened. “You understand,” I said slowly, “that any reasonable woman would leave right now.”

“Yes.”

“Any smart woman would probably stab you first.”

“Yes.”

“I have a knife in my bag.”

“I know.”

My mouth twisted. “Of course you do.”

He waited, the silence taking over the room. I should have walked out. I didn’t. It wasn’t because I forgave him. I did not. It wasn’t because I trusted him either. I stayed because Mikhail Orlov had my name, Daniel’s archive was sitting on the desk, and buried somewhere inside old money routes and newer lies was the reason my brother had disappeared. I had not come this far to stop because of what Ivan Morozov had done.

“You don’t get forgiveness tonight,” I said.

His gaze remained steady. “I did not expect it.”

“I’ll deal with all of this and you later.”

“Yes.”

“I mean that.”

“I know.”

His response should have made me angrier. It didn’t though. Maybe because this time, he had earned the right to know exactly how much trouble he was in.

I reached for the pen and he went very still. I picked it up, looked at it once, then set it beside my laptop. Not back in his reach or quite in mine either, but between us, a little bit closer to me. That was the only mercy he was getting.

Then I opened Daniel’s file.