Page 19 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Me:For now.

Sergei:Her?

I stared at the message. He was confirming what I had already hinted at earlier.

Sergei:I knew it.

Then I scoffed, locked the phone, and put it away.

On Friday, there was no Pavel. There weren’t any more sedans. Sergei’s report had been brief. Pavel had been encouraged to take a sudden interest in Chicago. His support had been relieved of a few tools and most of his confidence. Nothing traceable, because Sergei was just that good.

The immediate threat was gone for the moment, which meant I had no reason to stand across from the café early on Friday morning.

I stood there anyway.

The city had gone soft with morning light, the brick buildings warmed by the sun, the sidewalks busy with people who believed their lives were ordinary. Men in suits checked their fancy watches. Students crossed against traffic with headphones in. A woman dragged a reluctant dog past a puddle it clearly considered a personal enemy. Boston moved around me, loud and living and unaware of the little war being fought in the spaces between systems, streets, and one café window.

Kit arrived twenty minutes later. She paused outside the café door, but not for long. Just long enough to scan the reflections inthe glass. Her gaze passed over my side of the street and moved on.

I had chosen my position well.

She still looked tired. I had known it from the data—the hours she kept, the system activity that never quite went dark—but seeing it was different. She looked the sort of tired that accumulated when a person refused to stop. Tired people made mistakes and called them intuition. Tired people kept working because the alternative was stopping long enough for grief to catch up. I understood that better than I wanted to.

Inside, she ordered the same coffee, sat in the same window seat, opened the same laptop. She twisted her hair up with the same pen, and this time it held. The sunlight caught along the line of her cheek as she bent over her screen, turning her concentration into an almost severe expression.

I watched her read.

That was all.

There wasn’t any new assessment or data points I could not have collected from a distance or delegated to someone else. I had already mapped her route, her habits, her vulnerabilities, and even her awareness. I had confirmed Orlov proximity and interrupted it. I had done what I told myself I came to do.

The operational justification had run out on Wednesday.

Certainly by Thursday.

On Friday, even I could not make the lie elegant enough to tell myself again.

I stood across the street with cold coffee in my hand and watched Kit Calloway frown at whatever problem had dared to exist in front of her. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, took a drink, grimaced at the temperature, and kept working anyway.

A stubborn woman.

A dangerous woman.

A woman who should have been only a variable.

I had never done anything like this before. Not for a target, a client, or even for an enemy. Certainly not for a woman who did not know my name, who had already built traps for me, who would probably try to burn my life to ash if she learned how closely I had stepped into hers.

I should have left, but I waited until she looked almost ready to lift her head. Then I stepped back into the flow of pedestrians and disappeared before her eyes could find me.

I knew I wasn’t finished.

I knew I would come back.

And as I walked away, I allowed myself one honest thought, quiet enough that even I almost did not hear it.

This was no longer only operational.

It had not been for days.