Page 144 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“Yes.”

“And if you say good girl right now, I’m throwing this coffee at you.”

I leaned closer. “Then finish drinking it for Daddy first. You need the caffeine.”

She laughed. The sound was tired and brief and everything I wanted from the day.

By late afternoon, she was back in my bed with her laptop open across her thighs, still wearing my shirt, her legs tucked beneath the blanket and her hair pinned up with the blue pen I had returned. She had reclaimed it without ceremony. One moment it sat on the nightstand beside her coffee, and the next it was twisted through her hair where it belonged, the chewed cap visible above the dark knot. The sight did something to me.

Outside, Boston kept moving. Inside, my girl worked from my bed with her hair pinned up, Daniel’s name in the world at last, Mikhail Orlov wounded beyond recovery, and a new thread waiting in a file marked for Sergei.

The story was not finished. It never was.

But for the first time since I found a ghost in Orlov’s systems, the room around me felt exactly as it should.

Because my little girl was finally mine.

CHAPTER 25

Kit

Mikhail Orlov was arrested on a Tuesday.

The federal indictment itself was forty-seven pages and covered financial crimes, conspiracy, and obstruction charges. The warrant was executed at his Boston residence at six-seventeen in the morning, which I knew because I was awake at six-seventeen in the morning, which I had been most mornings for the past week, sitting at Ivan’s desk with my desktop running beside his machines and a coffee that was, for once, not cold.

He was going to prison for the rest of his life.

The network was not dead. Networks like the Orlov family’s didn’t die from the arrest of one man. Instead, they fractured, rearranged themselves, and eventually either found new leadership or cannibalized themselves. Maxim’s people were watching every single one of those threads.

Viktor Sokolov’s trust structure had been folded into the indictment as well, Aleksei’s quiet work on the paper trail giving federal investigators exactly what they needed to dismantle it.

Daniel’s name appeared in the indictment on page thirty-one, under the obstruction count. He wasn’t the centerpiece—that would come later, in a separate proceeding, when the authorization chain had been fully documented by the federal team—but it was there. His name. In a federal document. On the record.

I sat with that for a while.

Seven years. I had been running for seven years, and for the first time since the blood on his steering wheel I was not running toward anything. I was just sitting at my desk with a coffee that was the right temperature, and somewhere in a federal document my brother was no longer only missing. He was a name attached to a crime attached to a man who was going to answer for it. I had made peace, long ago, with the likelihood that I would never have a body to bury—only a name on a record that would not disappear, and that, I had decided, would have to be enough.

It was not the same as having him back. I knew that. I had always known it.

But it was something.

It was his name on a record that would not disappear. It was, in the specific and limited and real way of justice, enough.

Then I got up, made a second coffee, and went back to work, because that was what I did and Daniel would have understood it.

That had been four days ago.

The week had been a little complicated though. Living in Ivan Morozov’s apartment was not difficult in the logistical sense. My apartment lease was up at the end of the month, and I had already decided not to renew it. His apartment was large enough. My desktop had been set up beside his machines, the two systems co-existing with the peaceful professionalism of equipment that did not have opinions about the arrangement even if the people operating it did.

We argued about methodology constantly. About approach, about sequencing, about how to handle the secondary Orlov network now that Mikhail was in custody. Ivan was patient in the way that was most infuriating, which was the way that acknowledged my point and then held his position anyway, and I was patient in the way that was probably also infuriating, which was the way that made clear I had heard him and still believed I was correct. We were good at our work for the same reasons, and those reasons made us difficult to compromise with.

We were also, seven days in, not arguing only about work.

I had been testing him.

I had been testing him on purpose, not accidentally, not because I was overwhelmed, confused, or acting out of some unexamined impulse, but because I wanted to know what he would do.

I had been testing him in small ways all week. A decision made unilaterally that I had then told him about. A line of argument pushed an hour past reasonable. A task he had asked me to leave for the morning, completed at midnight, loudly, with the kitchen light on. Each time he had responded with varying degrees of his particular patience, a word, a look, once a hand at the backof my neck that had communicated a great deal without saying anything at all and each time, I had filed the response and noted it and understood that I was calibrating.