Page 35 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I thought of her finding me here.

I thought of the door opening and Kit standing in the frame with that cute, furious face, eyes catching everything at once—thepillow against my chest, my hand around my cock, the pen she would somehow know was hers in my jacket pocket. She would go still first. She was good at stillness. Then her jaw would set, and she would call me some vicious name.

In the fantasy, she was not frightened.

She was angry. She was aroused. She knew exactly what I had done, and she stepped closer anyway because curiosity was her fatal flaw and her finest weapon.

My hand tightened.

I imagined her looking down at me and asking what the hell I thought I was doing.

Watching you, I would tell her.

I stroked harder, jaw clenched, muscles tight beneath my shirt. The pleasure built with humiliating speed. It had been days of restraint, days of watching her move through a city full of threats she could not see all the way, days of wanting to drag her out of danger and into a room where no one could touch her without getting through me first.

I wanted her safe.

I wanted her furious.

I wanted her looking at me with full understanding and choosing not to run.

I wanted to put my hands on her and feel that brilliant mind stop for one second because her body had finally found a language even she could not outthink.

I wanted her on her hands and knees with her spanked ass in the air begging for Daddy to fill her up with his cock.

My breath grew rough.

I turned my face into her pillow and the scent of her hit me fully.

That was what ruined me.

I came with a low sound I barely managed to swallow, pleasure punching through me hot and hard enough to leave my spine rigid and my hand locked around my cock. For a few seconds, there was nothing else.

Only her.

When the moment passed, the room returned in pieces. The ceiling. The blinds. The muted traffic outside. The pillow crushed beneath my forearm. The stolen pen against my ribs. My own breathing, too loud in a room I had no right to be in.

I cleaned myself with the same meticulousness I gave every crime scene, because that was what this was, no matter what word I dressed it in. I didn’t leave anything behind. No evidence except the missing pen, and the pen was not evidence. It was a message or a weakness or maybe both.

I fastened my belt and lay back down instead of standing. I pulled her pillow back to my chest and looked at the ceiling.

The room felt different now.

It wasn’t because I had taken pleasure in it. That was part of it, yes, and I would not insult myself by pretending otherwise. But the change had been deeper than something as simple as lust.

Until that moment, I had believed there were still outcomes in which Kit Calloway could be killed.

That was the world I had lived in, one where everything had a price.

Lying in her bed with her pillow against my chest and her cheap blue pen in my pocket, I understood that world no longer applied.

I was not going to be able to watch her die.

Not for strategy, leverage, territory, peace, revenge, or any careful arrangement of pieces on a board.

Not for any reason.

The realization should have frightened me. Instead, it settled with a cold, perfect clarity that felt almost like relief. There would be consequences. A Morozov obsession did not sit in the corner with folded hands and wait patiently for what came next. It rearranged rooms. It started wars. It made men choose poorly and then defend those choices with blood.