Page 113 of Hunt Me, Daddy

The chime came from an alert I had built days earlier, before the conference, before the thing that happened in the restroom, before coffee, before being taken into custody and given bare-bottom consequences and his hand under my chin. It was a small tripwire, one of several buried around my Watcher file and its connected mirrors.

I did not look at Ivan as I clicked the alert open.

The thread was narrow. Almost stupidly narrow. A stale reference inside one of my older Watcher notes had pinged a private relay, which should not have been possible because that note was local. It had not been opened from my machine. It had not been copied through any channel I could see. It had simply been mirrored once, quietly, days ago, in a place I did not own.

I followed the thread taking one careful step and then another, letting the path reveal itself without pushing hard enough to make whatever waited at the end realize I was coming.

I finally stumbled upon a private server.

Ivan shifted beside me. It was barely anything at all, but I still noticed it.

The directory listing loaded.

For one second, my vision did something strange. The screen stayed clear. The room stayed just as it was. But the words in front of me seemed to lift out of the monitor and hang in the air between us.

KC_Assessment.

I stopped breathing.

There are moments when the mind understands before the body catches up. This was one of them. The letters sat there, clinical and tidy, and every piece of wrongness from the past weeks snapped into place with such violent precision that I felt nothing at first.

I didn’t feel angry or afraid. I only felt the cold feeling of recognition.

I opened the directory and Ivan stopped typing. Then he went still.

Inside were folders.

Routines.

Physical.

Digital.

Orlov Exposure.

Apartment.

Evan.

Daniel.

Watcher Response.

Containment.

For a long moment, I only looked at them. The room was so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of the monitors and the low, defined sound of Ivan breathing three feet away.

I opened Routines first.

It detailed my sleep schedule first. Then there were notes on when my systems went quiet. When my phone stopped moving. When my coffee consumption increased. When I worked best. When I made mistakes. When I ignored messages from Evan. When I showered. When I left my apartment. When I sat in the café window and twisted my hair up with a pen.

My mouth went dry.

I opened Physical next.

Inside were photographs. Me outside my building. Me through the coffee shop window, half-hidden by street reflections. My hand around a paper cup. My laptop open. My hair falling loose along my cheek while I looked down at something on my screen. The angles were distant. Careful, but still somehow intimate anyway.

My stomach went cold.