Page 7 of Hunt Me, Daddy

There it was.

He wasn’t using the public version of my name, or the amused one, the irritated one, or the one used when Nikolai wanted me to find out whether someone had rigged odds on a fight. Thiswas the old version. The brother version. The one that said there was no point trying to slide sideways because Maxim had already closed every exit.

I leaned back in my chair, letting a faint smile settle on my face because deflection was easier when dressed as charm.

“The Orlov situation is more complicated than it looked yesterday,” I said.

“That is not an answer,” Sergei observed.

“No,” I agreed. “It is a warning label.”

Maxim studied me for another long moment. “Do we have a problem?”

I thought of the file sitting behind three layers of encryption on the device in my jacket pocket.

Kit Calloway.

I thought of her name on my screen. Her apartment. Her dead brother’s case file. Her sleeping patterns. The cold little traps she had started building because she knew someone was there, because she was good enough to feel the air move even when she couldn’t see the hand passing through it.

I took another sip of vodka and let the burn settle at the back of my throat.

“Not yet,” I said.

Sergei’s gaze narrowed the tiniest bit.

Maxim heard what I hadn’t said. He always did. He had built an empire on the things men tried to hide between words.

“Then make sure it stays that way.”

“I’m handling it.”

Which was true.

Mostly.

The trouble had begun forty-eight hours earlier. Or maybe it had begun seven years before that, when a man named Daniel Calloway vanished near the Mystic aquarium with too many unanswered questions left behind. Maybe it had begun when his younger sister decided grief was not enough and turned herself into the kind of woman who could break into locked places without touching the door.

I didn’t know that part yet.

At first, she was only an anomaly.

That was all anything was in the beginning. A deviation. A line that didn’t match the expected behavior.

I had been in my security suite at the time, three floors below one of our properties, in a room built for men who preferred truth without decoration. It didn’t have a polished bar or a family table or anything remotely homey. Just reinforced walls, cold air, black monitors, servers humming behind glass, and enough encrypted traffic moving across my screens to make any federal agency weep with professional jealousy.

I liked that room. It did what I told it to do.

People rarely had the courtesy.

The Orlov infrastructure had been under my hands for months by then. I didn’t have their whole operation within my grasp—Mikhail Orlov was too careful about that, and I was toorespectful of competent enemies to assume access meant ownership—but I had enough. Financial shells, offshore routes, import companies, dormant LLCs that woke only when money needed to disappear, credential reuse from men who should have known better and didn’t because arrogance was the most reliable vulnerability on Earth.

The Orlovs had been quiet for too long.

Men like Mikhail did not forgive. They waited. They adjusted. They learned which doors were watched and then built new ones underground.

So I watched too.

Most people thought surveillance meant staring at cameras and waiting for someone to do something stupid. That was part of it, of course, but the better work happened where no one bothered looking. It was less like hunting and more like listening to a house breathe in the dark.