Page 9 of Hunt Me, Daddy

In this case, me.

She worked under Calloway Security Consulting, a purposefully boring business name that made me like her more than I wanted to. Her client list was small, private, and carefully scrubbed, but not carefully enough for me.

No one scrubbed carefully enough for me.

The Orlov contract stood out because she had buried it deeper than the others, which interested me immediately. The invoice had been paid seventeen days earlier. The engagement was marked closed. Final deliverables sent. Professional obligation complete. And yet she was still there.

Still watching. Still mapping their shells. Still building timelines. Still following money through dead companies and offshore routes with the stubbornness of someone who had stopped caring whether there was a paycheck at the end of the work.

That was when my curiosity transformed into concern.

Professionals stopped when the contract ended. Smart professionals stopped when the name Orlov appeared. Surviving professionals stopped when Mikhail Orlov’s network started looking back at them.

Kit Calloway had done none of those things.

I built the first dossier because that was what the situation required. I told myself that more than once. Lone female inside hostile infrastructure. Potential liability to Morozov operations. Possible law enforcement proxy. Possible Orlov bait. Assess, classify, contain.

By the end of the first twenty-four hours, I had her address.

She lived on the fourth floor of a converted brick building with old pipes, uneven hallway lighting, and a front security camera that had been installed by someone who considered the concept of angles optional. Her building management company had ignored three maintenance requests about the rear entrance camera. She had filed two of them herself, then stopped, which told me she had either given up on the official process or fixed the problem in another way.

I suspected the latter.

By hour thirty, I knew her sleep schedule was atrocious.

She went still around five in the morning most days, which I only counted as sleep because her systems entered a reduced activity pattern and her phone stopped moving for longer than ninety minutes. She woke too soon. She drank coffee at hours that suggested either discipline or self-destruction. Possibly both. She worked best after midnight. Her outgoing traffic spiked when the city quieted late at night.

By hour thirty-six, I knew about Evan.

Evan was a mistake with good hair and poor boundaries. I disliked him immediately, though I had no operational reason to have an opinion on the man beyond the fact that he texted her too late and too often.

You awake?

That was the type of message sent by a man who had not yet accepted that silence was also an answer.

She ignored him most of the time. Sometimes she answered with one word. Once, at 2:04 in the morning, she sent simply,No.

I liked that.

I liked it more than was appropriate.

I flagged Evan as low threat but persistent. Then I flagged him again underpersonal nuisance, a category I absolutely did not need and created anyway.

By hour forty, I found her brother Daniel.

Until then, Kit Calloway had been a problem made of data. Interesting, certainly. Skilled, definitely. Reckless enough to require monitoring. But still a set of variables arranged around my work. Name, location, habits, access, risk.

Daniel Calloway made her someone real.

The police file was old and thin. It noted an abandoned car near the Mystic aquarium, with blood on the steering wheel. There wasn’t enough for a body, but there was too much for comfort. It listed a last known contact with a colleague, as well as a witness statement that shifted between the first interview and the second, and there was one mention of a Russian accent that vanished from the official summary days later.

This all happened seven years ago.

I sat in the cold light of the security suite and read everything twice. Daniel had been a forensic accountant. Quiet, careful,no criminal record, no debt that mattered, no mistress, no gambling, no convenient vice the police could use to turn him into the sort of man who vanished because he deserved it. Two weeks before he disappeared, he had texted his sister.

I think I found something I wasn’t supposed to find.

Calling Maxim would have been the correct thing to do. Unknown civilian contractor with personal motive digging into Orlov financial infrastructure. Possible exposure. Possible witness to historic Bratva-adjacent activity. Possible leverage point for Mikhail if he discovered her. My family probably should know.