Page 23 of Hunt Me, Daddy

No one did.

Either I was imagining it, or whoever watched me was very, very good.

I hated both options.

By late afternoon, I returned home with three unnecessary books, one pack of batteries, and a better understanding of my own fear.

Fear, when examined properly, was just another information source. Messy, biased, often dramatic, but rarely random. Mine was not telling me Orlov. When I thought about Mikhail’s people finding me, my body went cold in a practical way, like reaching for a weapon. When I thought about the watcher or whoever this was, the feeling was different. He didn’t feel safe, not exactly, but different.

Orlov felt like a boot on a throat.

The watcher felt like a hand at the back of my neck.

Gentle. Almost guiding.

I stood in the middle of my apartment with my bag still on my shoulder and hated that thought so much I nearly laughed.

“No,” I said aloud.

The apartment did not answer. I set the books down, logged the outing, uploaded three reflection captures from my phone, and added them to the Watcher file. Two were useless. One showed the tall dark coat half a block behind me before the bus cut through the frame.

Blurry. I couldn’t make out the face.

Still, it was something. I cropped it, enhanced only enough not to lie to myself, and stared at it. My stomach tightened as I added another note to my file.

Tall. Dark coat. Unremarkable enough to be intentional.

By the time night settled over Boston, the Watcher file had grown by twelve entries, three images, two building schematics, and one extremely unflattering paragraph about my super’scompetence. The city outside turned reflective again, all black glass and streetlight glow, and my apartment became the sort of quiet that usually made me feel focused.

Tonight it made me feel observed.

I sat at my desk with my laptop open and the monitor angled exactly where it had been that morning, measured with the small ruler I kept in my drawer because that was who I had become. Cold coffee sat beside my right hand. My phone was face-down. The hall feed glowed in the corner of the screen.

I opened the Orlov map, then minimized it.

Opened the Watcher file.

The cursor blinked beneath the last note, patient and judgmental. Outside, a car passed slowly along the wet street below. Its headlights dragged white across my ceiling and vanished. I leaned back in my chair and looked toward the window.

Somewhere out there, maybe, someone was watching me. Someone had seen an Orlov scout and made him disappear. Someone had noticed a blind spot outside my building and closed it. Someone had moved through my life without leaving anything solid enough for me to hold.

I didn’t have any concrete evidence.

Nothing except the steady accumulation of a small list of things.

The thing about patterns, though, was that they did not require anyone’s permission to become real.

CHAPTER 6

Ivan

I told myself entering her apartment was necessary.

That was the problem with being intelligent enough to build a convincing argument. Given sufficient time, I could make almost anything make sense. I could line up the logic in neat rows, label the risks, assign probability values, and make the conclusion appear inevitable. A less careful man might have called it obsession. I called it situational coverage.

Kit Calloway was exposed.

That was fact.