Page 26 of Hunt Me, Daddy

It should have been irritating to read about myself when reduced to fragments. It was.

It was also fascinating.

She’d labeled me as an unknown actor. She didn’t think I was associated with the Orlovs or law enforcement either.

Very good.

Possibly watching me specifically.

Male? Tall. Dark coat. Unremarkable enough to be intentional.

I read that line twice. Then again.

She had almost nothing. A few route behaviors. A vanished scout. A corrected camera angle. A dark coat in a reflection. A feeling based almost entirely on instinct.

It was almost nothing.

It was also, somehow, exactly right.

I stood in the blue-white glow of her screen and felt something open quietly in my chest.

Most people missed me entirely. That was by design though. My brothers saw me because they had earned the right through blood, history, and irritating persistence. Enemies saw only what I allowed them to see. Women usually saw the glasses, the dry wit, the tablet I typically carried in my hand, and assumed the rest of me was softer than Nikolai’s fists or Maxim’s authority.

Kit had seen me, at least a little bit of me.

I wanted to see what she would write next. That, more than anything, told me I was in trouble.

I closed the file, restored everything exactly as it had been, and checked the time.

11:43.

I had now been in her apartment eighteen minutes longer than necessary.

I looked around the room and noticed the crossword sitting half-finished on the kitchen table beside a pencil, a folded napkin, and a mug with a chip on the rim. It was paper. The kind from an actual newspaper, neatly cut out and creased once down the middle.

I crossed to it before I gave myself permission.

Most of the grid was filled in. Her handwriting was clear and tight, letters pressed a little too firmly into the boxes. Three blanks remained, circled so faintly I doubted she realized she had done it.

14 Across: River through St. Petersburg.

22 Down: Trap made of a noose.

31 Across: Old cipher machine.

That one made me huff a quiet laugh. She knew that answer. She had to. Which meant she had either been too tired to see it or too irritated with the puzzle to let it have the satisfaction.

I looked at the pencil. Then at the door. Then back at the grid.

This was stupid. This was risk. This created evidence. It created contact. It took an invisible entry and made it personal in a way no competent man would allow.

I picked up the pencil and wrote in all three answers.

Three glaring mistakes.

I set the pencil down exactly where it had been and stared at what I had done. A part of me wanted to erase it, the sensible part, the part that still believed this could be contained if I simply returned to procedure and stopped behaving like a man unraveling in the apartment of a woman who did not know his name.

I did not erase it.