Page 2 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Mikhail Orlov was from Chicago. All the evidence pointed to the fact that he was Russian Bratva. He came from old money and even older blood, and he was the kind of man who didn’t need to show his face because his reach did it for him.

The contract had ended seventeen days ago. My invoice had been paid in full. My report had been delivered with charts, exposure points, and a very professional recommendation that my client not pursue the matter further without physical security support and legal insulation because poking a Russian crime syndicate with a digital stick was a great way to end up in a river if you didn’t know when to stop.

They stopped.

I didn’t.

Professional curiosity. At least that was what I called it when I reopened the archive at midnight. Professional curiosity was what I named the folder on my encrypted drive. Professional curiosity was the reason I had a corkboard propped against the wall beside my desk, half-hidden behind a rolling whiteboard, covered in red string, printed incorporation documents, cropped screenshots, timestamps, wallet addresses, and three photographs of men who probably killed people more often than they smiled.

I told myself the board wasn’t personal. It was a map. A pattern exercise. A way to keep my skills sharp between paid work, because the truth was most corporate systems were boring once you got past the first unlocked admin panel and the CEO’s nephew with production access.

But that wasn’t the whole truth.

The whole truth was in the bottom drawer of my desk, inside a blue file folder with a cracked plastic tab and a coffee stain on the front.

Calloway, Daniel.

My brother’s name looked different in black ink. Smaller. Colder. Reduced to police formatting and bureaucratic spacing, like enough margins could make grief more manageable.

I hadn’t opened that file tonight.

I didn’t have to.

I knew every page by heart. The police report. The last known location. The photograph of his car found abandoned near the Mystic aquarium, driver’s side door open, keys gone, blood on the steering wheel but not enough to prove death. The witness statement from a bartender who suddenly couldn’t remember anything after giving one very specific detail about a man with a Russian accent asking Daniel questions three nights before he vanished.

That had been seven years ago.

The case went cold before my anger did. There were no Orlov names in the file, no obvious answers, no neat villain sitting in the middle of the page waiting for me to circle him in red.

Just money.

Daniel had worked forensic accounting for a firm that didn’t technically handle criminal clients and absolutely did. Two weeks before he vanished, he sent me a text that said,I think I found something I wasn’t supposed to find.

Then nothing.

So yes, maybe when a paid contract put Orlov-linked shell companies in front of me, I didn’t close the tab.

Maybe I had timelines.

Maybe I had a board.

Maybe I had a cold case file I hadn’t told a single client about because clients got nervous when consultants brought ghosts to work with them.

My phone buzzed once on the desk. I glanced at it and rolled my eyes.

Evan:You awake?

I stared at the message for exactly three seconds, then flipped the phone face-down without answering.

Evan texted me at two in the morning because Evan had never met a boundary he didn’t think was secretly a negotiation. He was a mistake I had made for eight months because he was cute, funny, and emotionally available in the way a vending machine was technically available food. We had broken up four months ago. He still texted like there was an unfinished conversation between us.

There wasn’t.

I took another swallow of cold coffee, grimaced, and dragged my attention back to the monitor.

The script was still running.

I had built a passive surveillance net around the edges of the Orlov shell system over the past few weeks. Nothing loud enoughto get caught. I wasn’t dumb. I didn’t kick doors open unless someone was paying me enough to buy new locks afterward. This was much smarter than that. I watched metadata shifts, DNS movement, certificate changes, transaction timing, wallet hops, employee portal pings, and the tiny behavioral tells that people forgot were visible because they thought content was the only thing that mattered.