Page 5 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Saw me? Unknown.

I looked at that for a long moment. Then, because I believed in honesty, I added another.

If yes, did not strike.

That was the part I couldn’t stop circling.

A predator that saw you and didn’t lunge was still a predator. It was just one with patience.

A soft sound came from the hallway. The building settling, probably. Old pipes. A neighbor coming home. A mouse in the wall. There were a dozen harmless explanations, and I believed none of them until verified. I turned my head toward the door and waited. The sensor feed stayed still. No pressure on the mat. No movement in the hall camera. No shadow beneath the door.

I counted to sixty anyway.

Nothing.

Only then did I turn back to my screens. My pulse had not quickened.

I was proud of that.

Pride was stupid, so I dismissed it immediately and pulled up the external camera again, scrubbing back thirty seconds, then a minute, then five. All I saw was an empty hallway with peeling paint and weak yellow lighting. No person, no movement, no visible disturbance. Still, I opened a separate note.

04:19—possible hallway sound. No visual confirmation.

People dismissed little things. That was how little things became the last thing they ever heard.

I wasn’t melodramatic. I was experienced.

Dawn began to gather at the edges of the windows, turning the glass from black to a dirty gray. The city would start waking soon. Delivery trucks. Joggers with expensive shoes and dead eyes. Office workers buying coffee they would complain about but then return to buy again tomorrow. My inbox would fill with other people’s emergencies, requests marked urgent by men who had ignored my recommendations three months ago.

Normal life, in other words.

I stood and crossed to the corkboard. The Orlov map stared back at me, all red string and money trails and old sins dressed up as corporate filings. Mikhail Orlov’s name sat near the center, printed in clear black letters at the top of a page. Beneath it were subsidiaries, known associates, suspected shell managers, linked wallets, disputed properties, political donations, offshore routes. And now, off to the side, on a blank space I hadn’t used yet, I pinned a new index card with the word Watcher.

I underlined it once.

Someone had entered my investigation without permission.

Someone had moved through a system I was watching and done it well enough that, on any other night, I might have missed them entirely.

Someone was either hunting the Orlovs too…

Or huntingme.

A reasonable person would have closed the board, packed a bag, and gotten very far away from anything with the name Orlov attached to it.

I had never been all that reasonable.

I returned to my desk, sat down, and pulled my keyboard closer. My reflection hovered faintly on the dark edge of the secondary monitor—pale face, messy dark hair twisted up with a pencil, blue eyes sharp behind the tiredness.

I looked calm.

Good.

Let the watcher see calm if he was watching.

Let him see routine.

Let him see a twenty-eight-year-old woman who was pretending not to know he existed.