Page 120 of Hunt Me, Daddy

At the desk, Daniel’s file waited.

So did Mikhail.

I worked.

For her.

I built a timed release. I packaged everything about the case together, including Daniel’s evidence, the Seaport chain, the witness discrepancy, the warehouse record, the authorization, and Mikhail’s signature. Copies prepared for law enforcement, for journalists who still remembered how to be dangerous, for rival Bratva families who would not waste moral outrage when opportunity would do.

If the release was not manually cancelled every seventy-two hours, the packet would go out to a selection of people that would make it public in a major way.

I did not wake Kit to ask permission. She had asked me to help her end it and I would. The release would be there when she woke, and I would ask her what she thought then.

I did not go to bed.

My bed was occupied by the only person I wanted there, which was precisely why I stayed at the desk.

I watched the city. I watched the monitors. I watched the doorway to my bedroom where the soft rise and fall of Kit’s chest was visible beneath the blanket, but I did not go in.

I wanted to lie beside her, gather her against me, and feel her sleep through the storm of the last twenty-four hours. I wanted to put my hand over her hip and hold her there until morning found us both. I wanted to wake with her in my bed and have the first thing she see be me. The daddy in me wanted to gather, hold, command, and shield her from danger. But the truest part of that instinct, the part that mattered more than possession or heat or the satisfaction of seeing her obey, was that she was exhausted, and she needed sleep more than anything else.

So I sat alone in the blue light and built the weapon she had earned.

Every forty minutes or so, I looked toward the bedroom the way a man looked at something that had become the center of his world without asking permission. The half-open door. The darkness beyond it. The sound of her breathing, steady and even, that I had learned to distinguish from the other sounds the building made.

She had curled toward the window when I laid her down. The same as in the photographs from my assessment file, and something about seeing it in person rather than through a lens made the file feel distant, like a record of someone else’s observation. Someone who had not yet been in the room with her. Someone who had not yet understood the difference.

I had stood beside her with her boots still in my hands, not quite ready to leave. This time, I wasn’t watching or cataloguing her. I was only standing in the dark with the particular stillness of a man who had run out of reasons to move.

Eventually, I had walked away and worked and thought about the way her mouth had looked when she fell asleep at the keyboard, not pressed flat or forming her next point. I had spent weeks studying her face and had never seen it with nothing to say. I let that thought sit with me and did not decide what it meant yet.

Around five, she stirred and I looked toward the bedroom immediately. She did not wake just yet. She only shifted beneath the blanket, one hand curling near her cheek, her face turned toward the open door. In sleep, the sharp lines of her suspicion had softened. It wasn’t gone—Kit would probably distrust things in even in her dreams—but softened enough that I could see the girl grief had interrupted.

Mikhail Orlov had taken seven years of her life without ever needing to see her face.

That was going to cost him.

By sunrise, the release was fully built, Daniel’s packet was assembled, and the first cycle waited idle for Kit’s review.

The apartment had taken on the pale, washed quality of morning, all hard edges softened by gray light. My coffee had gone cold. My eyes burned faintly behind my glasses. Daniel’s file lay closed now, my hand resting on top of it without quite meaning to.

In the bedroom, Kit slept on.

Still alive.

Still safe.

Still under my roof, beneath my blanket, with the evidence of her brother’s murder finally ready to become more than a cold file.

And beneath all that, I hoped that she was still mine.

CHAPTER 21

Kit

I woke up with my cheek pressed to a pillow that smelled like Ivan Morozov and my hand curled beneath my chin like I’d been trying to hold on to sleep with my fingers.

For several seconds, I had no idea where I was.