Page 127 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“You were counting on it.”

Ivan turned his head toward me.

“Yes.”

I picked up my coffee again. My hand was steady. Ivan watched my face.

This time, I did not mind.

“Me too,” I said.

CHAPTER 22

Ivan

Maxim arrived at my apartment at 10:12 with all three of my brothers behind him and the expression of a man who had already decided not to forgive me quickly, which to be honest, was fair.

I opened the door before he knocked. That did not improve his mood. Maxim stood in the hall in a dark suit, calm as a funeral and twice as warm. Nikolai took up most of the space behind him, shoulders broad enough to make the corridor look badly designed. Aleksei stood slightly to one side, elegant and unreadable, his eyes already moving over the camera placement, the doorframe, the sightlines. Sergei was last, as usual, because Sergei preferred to see what everyone else missed.

His gaze flicked once to me.

Then past me.

To Kit.

She sat at my desk with Daniel’s file to her left, her laptop open, and my monitors showing the Orlov movement we had triggered. She had not stood when the door opened. I liked that. She did not rush to pay respect to men who had not yet earned anything from her. She only turned her chair enough to see them, one hand resting near her coffee, the other near the cracked blue folder that had become the center of the room. Her face was calm. Too calm, perhaps, for anyone who did not know her.

I knew her. There was fury under that stillness. Grief. Exhaustion. The hard edge of a woman who had spent seven years waiting for the truth and had no intention of being pushed aside by four dangerous men in expensive coats.

I stepped back. “Come in.”

Maxim entered first and his eyes moved over the apartment once. He did not miss the blanket folded at the end of the couch. He did not miss her bag near my bedroom door. He did not miss the pen on the desk between our workstations, though he could not know why that small blue object mattered enough to feel like a loaded gun.

My eldest brother missed very little.

Nikolai came in behind him and looked at Kit with undisguised curiosity. “So you’re the one making Ivan act like he has a soul.”

“Nikolai,” Maxim said.

“What? It’s a compliment.”

“It was not,” Aleksei murmured.

Kit looked at Nikolai for two seconds. “Are you always the emotional support noise?”

Nikolai blinked. Then he grinned. Sergei’s mouth moved, barely. Aleksei looked delighted. Maxim did not.

Good. He was not here to be charmed.

He was here to decide whether the woman under my roof was a liability, an asset, or a threat that needed to be moved out of Morozov space before my judgment compromised the family further.

I did not let myself step between them.

That was harder than it should have been. Kit did not need me to shield her from questions. If I did, Maxim would see only my claim on her, not her value. Worse, she would see it too and hate me for reducing her to someone that needed protection before she had a chance to prove she was dangerous.

So I stood beside the desk, close enough to intervene if necessary, far enough that she owned her answers.

Maxim faced her and cleared his throat.