Page 24 of Hunt Me, Daddy

The Orlovs were closing in on her. Pavel was gone only because I had made him go. The sedan had disappeared because Sergei had encouraged its occupants to reconsider their professional ambitions. The camera angle outside her building had been corrected because I did not like blind spots near her door, and the light above the entrance had been repaired because theincompetence of her building management offended me on both security and aesthetic grounds.

None of this was the issue.

The issue was that I knew that Mikhail’s people would not stop. They might slow. They might misread the trail I had laid for them. They might lose a day, two days, perhaps a week if their analyst remained mediocre and their arrogance remained high, which was generally a reliable bet with the Orlovs, but eventually, they would look again. And when they did, Kit’s apartment would become the center of the problem.

Remote access was possible, of course. Most things were possible. But possible and wise were not the same thing, and I had developed an allergy to men who confused them. Kit watched her systems like a woman waiting for an attack. A poorly timed connection would be seen. A well-timed connection might be seen. Even if I entered cleanly, I would be stepping into her domain in a way that would give too much of myself away.

Installing my own hardware would be faster.

I could observe everything that way. Hallway movement. Window approach. Fire escape activity. Unusual signal presence. Installing my own cameras would give me the kind of data I would need if the Orlovs came before I had time to intercept them further upstream.

So, at 11:18 on Monday morning, while Kit Calloway sat in a consultation meeting twelve blocks away with a biotech client whose network architecture looked like it had been designed during a fire drill, I let myself into her apartment.

I did not break anything. Breaking things was for amateurs and men who wanted the world to know they had arrived.

Her hallway was empty. Her building cameras saw what I wanted them to see. The lock yielded without complaint, which irritated me because it should not have been so easy, even though I had made a career out of things not being difficult enough for me.

I opened the door two inches and stopped.

She had set a trap.

There was clear string taped on the inside edge of the frame, a pressure mat under the rug, and a small camera hidden in the dead smoke detector near the hallway. She had made a little nest of suspicion around her own front door.

Good girl.

The thought arrived before I could stop it.

My hand tightened on the edge of the door.

No.

Not again.

She was notmygirl. She was not anything yet except a brilliant, reckless young woman.

The praise was inappropriate. So was the warmth it left behind. I ignored them both.

I stepped inside and replaced the string marker exactly. I made sure to steer clear of the rug and kept myself in the camera’s blind spot. By the time the door eased shut behind me, every oneof her traps was still waiting for an intruder who was already inside.

The apartment was smaller than it looked through camera angles and building schematics, though not by much. There was a brick wall along one side. Her desk was facing the room. Couch positioned with its back to a solid surface. The kitchen was clean. There was only one chair at the table. Her bookshelves were arranged by a system I did not immediately understand and therefore wanted to.

The place felt like her.

It wasn’t cozy or soft, or intentionally pretty, nor was it a room designed to charm visitors because she clearly did not want visitors. It felt defensive. Alive with quiet contingency. Every object seemed to have a reason, even if that reason was only that she had decided it belonged there and no one else had been invited to comment.

I liked it immediately, which was inconvenient.

I set the first device near the front entry, buried in the architecture already present enough that it would not create a new visual anomaly. The second went near the window facing the fire escape. The third was not surveillance in the strict sense, but an alarm layer tied to signal disturbance. If someone came too close to her space with the wrong equipment, I would know.

Seven minutes.

That was all it took.

Ten minutes later, the work was complete. I had done what I came to do. The apartment was undisturbed. My devices weresilent, dark, and nearly invisible. Instead of leaving, I stood in the center of her living room and listened.

There were a thousand reasons for a room to be quiet. Empty rooms were quiet. Dead rooms were quiet. Rooms waiting for someone to come home had a different quality to them, almost like a held breath, a sense of life paused rather than absent.

Kit’s apartment was not empty.