Page 138 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Then I turned back toward the window. His shirt was soft against my skin, the city coming up gold in the morning light. He stepped behind me again and his arms came around my waist, just holding me. The warmth of him seeped into my back and I relaxed by a degree I did not know I had left.

His chin rested on my shoulder. “You feel it too, don’t you?”

I was silent for a long moment.

“Yes, Daddy. I do.”

CHAPTER 24

Ivan

Kit drank coffee at my window in nothing but my shirt, and for the first time in longer than I cared to examine, the city below my apartment felt like it could wait.

I stood behind her, one arm around her waist, my other hand braced lightly at her hip. She had allowed the hold without comment. That was not a small thing. Kit could argue with a locked door and make the door feel intellectually inferior. Letting me hold her in silence while morning came up over Boston was trust in a language she did not yet want to admit she spoke.

I rested my mouth against the back of her head. She leaned back against me by a fraction and I felt it everywhere.

“Don’t be smug,” she said.

“I was very restrained.”

“That sounded smug.”

“It was factual.”

She made a soft sound into her coffee that was not quite a laugh and not quite surrender. I had already learned to be grateful for her almosts. Almost laughter. Almost softness. Almost rest. With Kit, almost was not hesitation. It was a door she opened a crack and dared me not to force wider.

So I did not.

We stayed there until she finished her coffee, until the light changed from gray to pale gold, until her fingers loosened around the mug and her shoulders stopped sitting so close to her ears. Then she turned in my arms, looked up at me with sleep still smudged at the edges of her eyes, and said, “We have work.”

Of course we did.

My girl had been naked in my bed only hours earlier, warm and responsive beneath my hands, and still woke ready to fight.

I wanted to take her back to bed. I wanted to put her under the covers, lock the world out, and spend the next twelve hours proving to her that there were better uses for adrenaline than survival and working yourself to the bone. But Mikhail Orlov was moving assets, Daniel Calloway’s evidence was loaded inside a timed release, and Kit’s mind had already begun turning.

“Then we work,” I said.

She studied me as if she expected argument, but I gave her none, which almost seemed to irritate her more.

Good.

I liked her awake.

We returned to the desk with coffee, two laptops, Daniel’s folder, and the quiet knowledge that the shape of the day had already been decided. The release was scheduled for noon. Mikhail had done exactly what Kit and I expected him to do. He moved. He shifted ownership chains, transferred signing authority, burned old shells, and tried to bury the asset movement inside a dozen harmless-looking corporate adjustments.

Kit had caught the first tremor before I did. She had placed a secondary tracker inside the Seaport subsidiary, a small, elegant thing tucked where the old records crossed the new structure. She did not tell me until it flagged the movement, and when I looked at her, she lifted one shoulder with the faintest edge of satisfaction.

“You’re not the only one who plans ahead,” she said.

“No,” I replied. “You are simply the prettier one.”

That earned me a real smile she tried to hide.

We tightened the release together. Kit reviewed the language one more time. I checked the evidence packet. She added two names on the recipient list. I confirmed that the asset movement Mikhail had triggered would be visible in the first wave. She rewrote one sentence about Daniel because my version, in her words, “sounded like a man trying not to feel anything.”

By ten-thirty, she yawned for the third time in seven minutes.