Page 13 of Hunt Me, Daddy

It made her real.

Kit Calloway sat in her apartment somewhere across the city, building traps for a man she had not met, while Mikhail Orlov’s shadow stretched closer to her door with every hour she stayed inside his systems.

She thought she was hunting alone.

She was wrong.

I turned off the tablet and slipped it back inside my jacket, close enough that I could feel the hard edge of it against my chest.

This was operational assessment, I told myself.

Protection of Morozov interests.

Risk containment.

Threat management.

All very reasonable.

All very logically sound.

Then I looked out at Boston, toward the part of the city where her apartment waited in the dark, and the word came anyway.

Mine.

I did not correct it.

CHAPTER 3

Kit

By the time I admitted I was no longer focusing on investigating the Orlovs, it was raining hard enough to turn Boston into a smear of reflected light while I reflected on my bad decisions.

I hadn’t slept, which wasn’t a dramatic statement. It was simply data.

I’d been awake for thirty-one hours straight. I’d had five cups of coffee and three protein bars because my body was technically a system I was responsible for maintaining, even if I resented the upkeep. There was one unopened container of Thai noodles sitting in the fridge because ordering food had seemed like a responsible adult decision at the time and eating it had seemed like an unnecessary delay.

The Watcher file was still open on my secondary monitor.

It had stopped being a note sometime around dawn and had become a full-blown case, which pissed me off.

I didn’t need another case.

I had one already.

Still, the file was there, organized into neat sections because apparently even my spirals had formatting standards.

I couldn’t drag my focus away from it.

Something about the touch in the system felt male to me. Not because it was brutish. It wasn’t. That was the problem. It was restrained, patient even. It carried the calm certainty of someone who did not expect to be interrupted.

I didn’t like that.

Mostly, though, I had questions. Who was he? Why had he found the same shadows I had? Why hadn’t he exposed me if he’d seen me lurking around in the data?

My first trap had been built for Orlov muscle, or at least that was the lie I was still telling myself. It looked like a money trail tied to a fake freight company, a few shell entities, and just enough sloppiness to make some overconfident criminal think he had found a secret I’d forgotten to hide. There were fake credentials tucked where a careless accountant might leave them, a preview image wired to alert me if it was opened, and a few other quiet little hooks designed to gather useful information from anyone stupid enough to bite.

It was good work. Patient work. Mean in a way that made me proud, which was always a dangerous emotion because pride had the survival instincts of a drunk raccoon.