Page 25 of Hunt Me, Daddy

It was full of her.

That was the first truly dangerous thought of the morning.

I looked at my watch.

It was 11:26 now.

I decided to stay a bit longer.

Her desk drew me first, naturally. It was the center of the room and the center of her life. She had two monitors. A laptop dock. A secondary machine off to the side. A mechanical keyboard with worn keycaps and one small scratch along the space bar. A ceramic mug with coffee dried in the bottom. Three pens, all black. A fourth one blue. A stack of sticky notes clinging to the monitor frame like evidence.

I did not touch the keyboard.

I did read the notes though.

Gray coat missing. Why?

Evan = Do not reply.

Eat actual food, idiot.

That last one made my jaw tighten.

I turned toward the kitchen before I had decided to move. Her refrigerator was predictably bleak. She had written herself a note to eat actual food and had apparently declined to take her own advice.

My palm flexed once at my side.

The image came too easily, Kit pinned over my knee, bottom bare, furious and flushed and incredibly sore, learning exactly what happened to stubborn girls who treated their bodies like disposable hardware. It would be the first real spanking of her entire life, no doubt.

My cock responded with a hard, immediate pulse of interest.

I went still.

“Get a grip, Ivan,” I murmured.

The words sounded too loud in her kitchen.

I had no right to think of her like that in the middle of her apartment while she was not here to look me in the eye and tell me to go to hell.

Not yet…

The two words came after the denial, quieter and much worse.

I rubbed a hand over my jaw and turned back toward the desk.

I needed to focus on work.

That was safer.

Her secondary machine was locked, as expected. The encryption program she used made me pause for the first time since entering the apartment.

Valkyrie.

I had written Valkyrie six years ago and buried it afterward, but apparently not thoroughly enough. Kit Calloway had found my own program and used it to lock away her file on me, which was so audacious I almost smiled.

I had the recovery seed, of course. Not because I expected to need it, but because I had written the thing, and I never trusted my own code less than other people’s intentions. I entered the key sequence from memory, waited through the challenge, and watched the file open.

Watcher.