Page 108 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Sergei was still talking when I saw her leave my apartment.

I did not interrupt him.

The monitor was in my peripheral view. I had positioned it that way intentionally, angled so I could watch her apartment feed without making the watching obvious. I had expected the evening to end differently. I had expected dinner, more work, the gradual negotiation of proximity that Kit Calloway would never have admitted she was conducting but absolutely was. I had not expected her to zip her bag while I was in the other room and walk out the door like she had decided the conversation was over.

She moved quickly, but not recklessly, which honestly would have been easier. She moved like a woman who had left places before without wanting to be followed, who knew which entrances avoided cameras, who had already run the risk calculation before she reached the elevator.

She had calculated wrong.

I had cameras in her building. I had cameras in this building. I had coverage on the three most likely routes between the two, because when you understood that a woman was going to be difficult about staying in one place, you planned accordingly.

“Ivan.”

Sergei’s was voice, dry and certain.

“Yes,” I said.

“You went quiet.”

“I’m listening.”

“You are not.”

I watched the feed. Kit moved through the lobby of my building with her bag pulled close, her head just slightly tilted, checking the reflective surface of the elevator door as she passed it. She found nothing—I had her covered at an angle she would not think to check—and stepped outside.

“Finish the thought,” I said.

Sergei finished it and I retained approximately sixty percent of what he said, which was enough for operational purposes, and more than most people managed. When the call ended, I set the phone down and watched Kit’s rideshare pull away from the curb.

I sat with that for a moment.

I wasn’t angry. That was not the thing moving through me, though it would have been a cleaner emotion. What I felt was more a particular, focused heat. I had told her the window wasstill active. I had told her to stay where I could keep her alive. I had said the words clearly, in plain language, because Kit did not respond well to implication. She had left anyway. And she had not told me she was going.

That was the part that mattered.

She had left anyway. Without a word.

So I folded my hands on the desk and waited.

* * *

She was gone for twenty minutes. She came back through the front entry at a pace that was half a degree too casual, which was how Kit moved when she thought she had gotten away with something. I recognized it. I had catalogued her tells the way I catalogued everything.

I heard the lock.

I did not turn around.

I listened to her set her bag down. The particular sound of it. The weight of it and I decided right then what I was going to do.

I was not a man that made idle threats.

I was a man that followed through.

“Productive trip?” I asked.

She sassed me back.

My jaw tightened once before I controlled it. I removed my glasses and set them on the desk, taking a deep breath as I did so. I have put men underground for smaller lies than the oneKit Calloway told me with a straight face in the entry of my own apartment.