Page 141 of Hunt Me, Daddy

By 12:31, the financial chain connecting Mikhail Orlov to Daniel Calloway’s disappearance was public.

By 12:47, it was in the hands of the public.

Mikhail was not going to recover from it. I watched both feeds for several minutes, then looked toward the bedroom.

She deserved to see it.

She also deserved twenty more minutes of sleep.

Daddy chose sleep.

I made coffee.

When I carried the mug into the bedroom, she had not moved except to curl one hand beneath her cheek. I set the coffee on the nightstand where she would smell it when she woke. Then I went back to the desk and checked the deeper movement Mikhail had triggered during the first public wave.

That was when I first saw the Volkov name.

At first, it looked like nothing. An old payment path buried so deep in dead records that most analysts would have dismissed it as historical noise and moved on. Money had moved through a defunct shell company I recognized by structure before Irecognized the name, then through two dead accounts, then into an entity tied to the Volkov family.

I stopped moving.

There are names a man reads. There are names a man remembers. And then there are names that reach across years and put the smell of smoke back in his throat.

The Volkovs were Bratva too, but not the kind men joked about over vodka or dressed up in legitimate paperwork for polite rooms. The Volkovs were the old kind. Vicious. Impatient. Brutal enough that even men raised around blood lowered their voices when speaking of them. They did not only kill. They erased. They made examples out of families and called it discipline.

They had killed our parents in Moscow.

A bombing. Years ago now. Sergei had been there that night. He had walked out alive. Our parents had not. He never spoke of the fire, the street, the bodies, or whatever he saw in those first minutes after the blast. We never forced him to. Family learned, eventually, that some wounds were not secrets. They were graves. You did not dig them up just because you loved the person buried beside them.

I stared at the record until the numbers blurred.

This was not proof. Not yet.

But it was the first time Orlov money had appeared anywhere near the Volkov name and the night that destroyed my family.

A payment path. A dead shell. A buried connection.

A thread.

And for the first time, I wondered if what happened in Moscow had not been random brutality at all.

I wondered if it had been arranged.

I gathered what I could. This was not something I could keep from my brothers—not with what it might mean about Moscow, about our parents, about the night Sergei had walked out of a fire and never spoke of it again. But I would not bring it to Maxim half-formed. If I was wrong, I would have raised a ghost for nothing. If I was right, I would need more than a payment path and a name to say it out loud.

Kit woke at 1:07.

I heard the shift before she spoke. A rustle of sheets, a quiet intake of breath, then the small pause that meant she had found the coffee.

“You made me coffee,” she called, voice rough with sleep.

“Yes.”

“This is suspiciously nice.”

“I am a suspiciously nice man.”

“You are absolutely not. You spank very hard.”