Page 11 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I batted it away. “I will break into your phone and set your alarm to play Italian opera every morning at 6:00 a.m. for a month.”

He grinned. “Joke’s on you. Sloane would like that.”

“She would not.”

“She might.”

“She has good taste,” Aleksei murmured.

Nikolai pointed at him. “Stay out of this, gallery boy.”

The room softened for half a second with familiar irritation and brotherly noise, but Maxim didn’t join it. He kept watching me.

After the meeting ended, he waited until Nikolai and Aleksei had drifted toward the bar and Sergei had stepped away to take a call near the hall. Then he poured two fingers of vodka into my glass and slid it toward me.

I did not touch it.

“That bad?” he asked.

I looked at him and sighed.

Maxim Morozov was many things. He was ruthless, controlled, and occasionally insufferable, but never careless. Like eldest brothers often did, they confused age with omniscience, despite being annoyingly right a considerable amount of the time. If I told him there was a woman standing too close to Orlov fire, he would ask her name. Then he would ask why I had waited to say it. Then he would put her on a board, in a plan, under protection, and inside the machinery of our family before I had decidedwhat she was to me. I wasn’t ready for that. Worse, I didn’t want it.

That should have told me everything.

Instead, I picked up the glass. “The Orlov network has another set of eyes on it,” I said.

His expression sharpened immediately. “Whose?”

“I’m still confirming,” I lied.

It wasn’t quite a full lie. There were always things to confirm. But close enough that it sat badly in my mouth.

“Government?” Maxim asked.

“No.”

“Orlov?”

“No.”

“Then who?”

I took a drink, buying myself three seconds I didn’t need.

“A contractor, maybe. Someone careful.”

Maxim leaned back. “Careful enough to concern you?”

“Yes.”

That was at least honest.

“And dangerous?”

I thought of her traps. Her discipline. Her stubborn refusal to retreat from a threat she did not fully understand. I thought of Daniel Calloway and a bloodstained steering wheel. I thought ofMikhail’s people finding her apartment before she knew enough to run.

“To herself,” I said.