Page 119 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I had suspected Mikhail’s involvement since I first traced the Seaport corridor. That was why I had flagged the warehouse permit, back when Kit Calloway had been only a name in a system, before she had a face or a crossword or a pen with her teeth marks on the cap.

Mikhail had ended Daniel Calloway’s life with a signature, buried it in three layers of corporate language, and moved on without ever learning that the dead man’s sister was already in the data. Already pulling threads. Already coming.

Seven years of that.

I watched her face and said nothing.

Kit inhaled slowly and then said, “Help me end it.”

I didn’t hesitate for even a moment.

“We end it together.”

She nodded once and we got back to work.

The room narrowed to Daniel’s file and the Orlov trail, to old records and newer lies, to Kit’s hands moving over the keyboard with a meticulousness that looked like calm if one did not know her. I knew her. I saw the strain under it. The exhaustion beginning to drag at the edges of her focus. The way her jaw stayed tight every time Daniel’s name appeared. The way shetouched the cracked tab of his folder once when she thought I was looking at the screen.

I was not.

I was looking at her.

Near two, she found the last missing piece: a warehouse invoice tied to the authorization chain, small enough to be dismissed, placed exactly where Daniel would have noticed it because Daniel, it seemed, had been like his sister in at least that way. Too clever to look only where the world wanted him to look. Too stubborn to stop when the discrepancy stayed small.

She saved the file, then opened it again to make certain it had saved properly. She did that three times. Only then did her shoulders begin to lower, not in relief, but in the kind of collapse that came after the body realized the battle had paused for one breath and tried to claim it before the mind objected.

“Eat,” I said.

“No.”

“Water.”

She reached for the glass without arguing, which told me she was even more tired than she looked.

A little while later, she fell asleep at my desk. Her head dipped once, lifted, and she blinked hard at the screen as if offended by the concept of biology. Ten minutes later, her fingers stilled on the keyboard. Her chin lowered toward her chest. A strand of dark hair slipped forward along her cheek. Her breathing evened out and I knew she was asleep.

I sat beside her and did not move for several seconds.

Waking her would have been easy. She would have startled awake, denied sleeping, glared at me for noticing, and dragged herself toward the guest room on pride alone. Perhaps she would have made it. Perhaps she would have argued with me first, because she was exhausted, sore, furious, grieving, and allergic to being managed.

I did not wake her.

I slid one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her back, lifting her slowly enough that if she started, I could set her down before fear found a weapon. She made a small sound when I lifted her, not waking fully, only turning toward my warmth with an instinct that tightened a knot deep in my chest. Her head settled against my shoulder.

I went still.

There she was.

Kit Calloway, a woman who had hunted ghosts through criminal networks, who had stared at my private assessment file and not left, a woman who had taken her first real spanking with tears in her eyes and defiance still burning under them, and a woman who had just found the man who ordered her brother’s death, had just fallen asleep in my arms. Trusting me only because exhaustion had outflanked suspicion. It was one of the most intimate things that had ever happened to me.

I carried her to my room.

My bed had never looked like it belonged to anyone before. A place to sleep, when necessary, to lie still when the body demanded maintenance, to exist between problems. Kit changed that simply by being placed on it.

I laid her down on her side because I knew her bottom still had to hurt. I removed her boots. Then I pulled a blanket over her. I tucked it around her shoulders, then smoothed the hair from her face.

I left the door open and returned to the desk.

The apartment felt different with Kit sleeping in my bed. The room seemed to hold its breath around her, and I found myself moving more softly through my own space than I ever had for myself.