Page 73 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Inside my apartment, everything was exactly as I had left it, but I checked everything anyway, just to be sure. Then I opened the Watcher file, and I scrolled to the latest visual note.

Male? Tall. Dark coat. Unremarkable enough to be intentional.

I stared at it. Ivan was tall. Ivan owned a dark coat. Ivan was not unremarkable though, not once you looked directly, which should have disqualified him.

It did not.

I sat there with my fingers resting on the keyboard and imagined typing his name beneath the description.

The cursor blinked. Patient. Judgmental.

I did not type it.

Instead, I closed the file and opened the Orlov map. For half an hour, I told myself I was only reviewing. Then I found a shift in one of the old shell routes, a narrow little change in behavior that looked unimportant if you believed unimportant things deserved to exist unexamined and I followed it.

I wasn’t being reckless. That was what I told myself, anyway. Then Ivan’s voice moved through my head.

You are thorough. It is not the same thing.

I leaned back in my chair and glared at the screen.

“Shut up.”

The screen, being smart, did not respond.

I kept working because yes, I had heard him. Yes, I understood that the file had become more dangerous than it had been when I first opened it. Yes, I knew Mikhail Orlov’s world did not stop at bank transfers and shell companies and pretty little lies on incorporation paperwork. Money moved because men moved it. Men with hands. Men with guns. Men who did not require certainty before turning suspicion into violence. I knew all of that.

I kept going anyway because somewhere inside that network was a clue about what happened to Daniel.

Stopping would feel like surrender.

I did not stop.

If Ivan Morozov wanted me off this file, he was going to have to find another way.

CHAPTER 15

Ivan

Mikhail Orlov’s people had her name by the time I finished pretending coffee had been about coffee.

Her name sat in an Orlov analyst’s report like someone’s dirty hands had touched it, and for a moment, everything in me went quiet enough to become dangerous. I stood in my apartment with the lights dimmed low, the air cold, and her cheap blue pen between my fingers. The one I had taken from her desk. I turned it once, slowly, as I read the translated note on the monitor.

Source identified: Kit Calloway. Freelance cybersecurity consultant. Boston. Address attached. Physical confirmation pending. Move within twenty-four hours.

Someone competent had entered the Orlov operation and that annoyed me most after the threat itself. Until now, Mikhail’s digital people had been good enough to be inconvenient but not good enough to frighten me, but this new hand had corrected my false trail faster than expected. He had looked at Kara Caldwell and asked the one question I had not wanted him to ask.

Why is she so convenient?

Competent men were tedious. Competent men near Kit were unacceptable.

I set the pen down before I snapped it in half.

On the fourth monitor, Kit’s building sat in grainy exterior footage, the front light glowing above the door like a small insult to every line I had already crossed. Her windows were dark. She was inside, according to the movement patterns I still told myself were necessary to monitor, though even that lie had become thin enough to see through. She had gone home after coffee and worked late because that was just who she was. I had warned her. She had heard me and she had filed the warning somewhere in that brilliant, stubborn head of hers and then done exactly what I knew she would do.

She kept digging.

That was the thing about Kit. She did not confuse fear with instruction. A sane man would have admired that from a distance, but I was not sane where she was concerned. Not anymore.