Page 46 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“I don’t have feelings.”

“Everyone says that until Nikolai steals their sandwich.”

His mouth twitched. Barely. Then he walked away.

I stayed at the edge of the Iron Wolf and checked the Orlov feed from my phone. Kara Caldwell’s false address had just been discovered.

Good.

The Orlov analyst had taken the bait.

Also not good, because competent men eventually wondered why bait tasted sweet.

I closed the feed and touched the inside pocket of my jacket.

The pen was still there.

For a moment, the tavern blurred around me. All of it faded behind the image of Kit alone in her apartment, unaware that Mikhail Orlov’s people had reached the edge of her life and that I had spent the entire day shoving them back with both hands.

She did not know I had bought her time.

She did not know how little of it there might be.

She did not know I had lied to my brothers for her either.

I looked toward the door, toward the wet black streets beyond the Iron Wolf, and felt the countdown begin again beneath my ribs.

Seventy-two hours was no longer the problem.

The problem was what I would become before it ran out.

CHAPTER 11

Ivan

The meeting had to look like chance.

A professional introduction in a public space. Mutual context. Enough noise around us that she could choose to dismiss me. Enough control in the structure that she would not.

My apartment was colder than usual, though that might have been my own exhaustion. The server cabinets hummed softly behind glass, rows of lights blinking with the untroubled rhythm of machines that did not care whether a man lied to his family, entered a woman’s apartment, stole her pen, or engineered a meeting with her under the pretense of keeping her alive. Machines were comforting that way.

People were much less efficient.

On my main monitor, the Orlov analyst continued to chase the Kara Caldwell trail, which was holding up better than I had any right to expect. For now, Mikhail’s attention remained pointedaway from Kit’s actual address, her actual name, and the rest of her actual life.

For now.

I really disliked that phrase.

On the secondary monitor was the conference registration portal for SecureLine East, a mid-sized cybersecurity industry conference being held in Boston over three days in a hotel near the waterfront. It wasn’t an overly large event, but SecureLine East had enough academic participation to attract serious researchers, enough private sector money to attract consultants, and enough poorly secured badge systems to offend me on a personal level.

Kit was already registered.

I had checked.

Three times.

There was something almost normal about it there, printed beside her company name and a dietary preference she had not selected because of course she had not bothered.