Page 53 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Workers moved inside, setting signs in place. A banner for SecureLine East hung above the doors. Registration tables waited beyond the glass. In a few hours, the lobby would fill with consultants, researchers, executives, analysts, vendors, and one woman who had been hunting me in every reflective surface Boston offered.

I imagined her approaching the doors.

Dark coat. Laptop bag. Hair probably pinned up. Eyes moving before her head did. She would dislike the crowd. She would choose her route before entering. She would see too much and still not enough. I had engineered all of it.

This was the single most elaborate thing I had done for another person in my adult life.

I told myself it was to move her off a dangerous file. I told myself that again while the first morning light caught on the hotel glass and briefly turned the entrance gold.

It was true, but it was also not enough. Whatever happened inside that room, whatever she saw when she finally looked at me directly, whatever version of myself I performed for her first, I understood with a clarity that settled cold and final beneath my ribs that I would not leave unchanged.

And neither would she.

CHAPTER 12

Kit

By nine in the morning, the lobby of the SecureLine East conference had already filled with men in branded quarter-zips talking too loudly about threat models, venture capital, and zero trust as though repeating a term made it less meaningless. Someone had set up a coffee station near registration, which meant the whole entry area had become a bottleneck of lanyards, rolling laptop bags, and people pretending they did not enjoy being recognized by name.

I hated conferences, but it wasn’t because I hated people. I didn’t, technically. I just preferred them in controlled quantities and preferably with an unsubscribe option. I especially hated this one because they had put my full name on my badge instead of Kit, which was annoying.

I was there for three reasons.

First, Dr. Mara Chen was giving a session on adversarial attribution in financial crime, and I admired Mara Chen enoughto tolerate fluorescent lighting and strangers who opened conversations with, “So, what’s your stack?”

Second, I had a professional obligation to keep existing in rooms where people remembered I existed. Freelancing was not just doing the work. It was reminding people, periodically, that you were the sort of person they should pay before disaster struck instead of after.

Third, I had been spending too much time alone with the Watcher file.

I had not slept properly in days. My apartment felt less like an apartment and more like a stage someone else had already walked across. I still had the crossword sealed in a folder. I still had the photograph of those three answers saved in four places.

My watcher had been quiet since the near miss.

I had started checking reflections with the kind of discipline that would have made a spy proud and a therapist reach for a notebook. Dark shop windows. Car doors. Polished elevator panels. The dead black screen of my own phone. Twice that week, I’d felt him near enough that the back of my neck prickled before my brain found any reason for it. Once, I’d turned too slowly and found only a normal street. The second time, I’d turned fast and looked directly at a doorway half a block away, where a tall man in a dark coat stood perfectly still. My gaze had moved on.

I didn’t know why.

Maybe the distance had been wrong. Maybe the light. Maybe he was exactly unremarkable enough for my eyes to decide there were better threats to catalog. Or maybe I had looked right at my watcher and failed to recognize him.

That possibility made me furious in a way I could not comfortably express in public, so I put on a black blazer, pinned my hair up with an aggressively ordinary pen, and went to a conference like a functioning adult.

The hotel ballroom was exactly as depressing as hotel ballrooms tended to be. Beige walls, blue-gray carpet, chairs that hated the human spine, and a stage flanked by banners that made security look clean, corporate, and bloodless. It wasn’t. Security was messy. Mostly defensive, sometimes predatory, and always more interesting in the shadows than on the PowerPoint slides.

Mara Chen’s talk was worth the chairs.

By the time she finished, half the audience looked impressed, and the other half looked like they were about to start charging more for their work.

Beautiful.

After the talk, I went to the closed roundtable Mara mentioned to me that was happening down the hall because I was curious enough about the person of interest to go.

The roundtable was smaller, held in a conference room with water glasses sweating on a side table and a speakerphone no one intended to use. Twelve people sat around a long table, with a handful more along the wall. They were researchers, private analysts, two government types pretending they weren’t government types, and one man seated near the far end who I couldn’t get a read on. I noticed him last, which annoyed me for some reason.

He was not doing anything obvious like standing apart or commanding attention by volume or performance. He sat with one hand resting loosely near a closed notebook, the otherholding a pen he was not using. He was lean, but apparently well-muscled for an analyst. He was wearing a dark suit and glasses with thin black frames. Hair neatly kept, darker than I expected, threaded at the temples with just enough silver to make me aware he was older than I had thought he would be.

Thought who would be? I didn’t know. The expectation had arrived before the logic did, and I disliked that immensely.

He looked up as Mara led me in at exactly the right moment. His eyes were pale blue behind the glasses and I looked away first. I didn’t know why I did that either.