Page 27 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I exhaled slowly.

“Careless,” I said under my breath.

My voice contained no conviction. The bedroom door was half-open. That was where I shouldn’t have gone.

So naturally, I did.

I did not cross the threshold at first. I stood in the doorway and told myself I was checking sightlines to the window, possible entry points, whether the old fire escape could be reached from the bedroom if the living room became compromised. All valid questions. All irrelevant to the fact that my attention went first to her bed.

Unmade on one side only.

The right side, if standing at the foot. The blanket kicked down, sheet twisted, pillow flattened at the edge where she must have slept curled toward the window instead of the door, despite all her caution elsewhere. A sweater hung over the chair back, black and soft-looking, one sleeve turned inside out. Her boots were lined up near the closet, one slightly ahead of the other.

There was no perfume in the room. Just clean laundry, stale coffee, the lemon cleaner she used in the rest of the apartment, and underneath it something strong enough to affect me that I could only identify as her.

I wanted to touch the sweater.

I wanted to straighten the blanket.

I wanted to stand in the room long enough to know whether the book on the nightstand had frustrated her or comforted her before she fell asleep.

I wanted things that had no place in an operational assessment.

My cock had been half-hard since the refrigerator, and now the ache settled deeper, hotter, less willing to be ignored. I closed my eyes for one second, just one, and imagined her in that bed with her hair loose against the pillow, eyes closed, mouth soft.

No.

I opened my eyes.

I couldn’t do that.

Those were the rules I gave myself, as though rules made this less wrong.

I remained in the doorway for seven minutes.

Seven.

Then I planted the last bit of hardware I had in my pocket in her bedroom. There really wasn’t a reason for it being there. I just wanted it to be there.

Then I stepped back. The apartment seemed different when I returned to the living room. A book lay face-down on the arm of the couch with its spine bent in a way that would have made Aleksei wince. I checked every marker again. The tape. The mat. The position of the chair. The angle of the crossword, though that no longer mattered because I had already ruined it. I wiped nothing because I had left nothing careless enough to wipe. I locked the door behind me and restored the hall exactly as it had been. At 11:58, I was gone. I’d spent forty minutes inside.

Seven for the work. Thirty-three for the woman.

That was a terrible imbalance, and I should have been ashamed of it, but I spent the drive back to the Iron Wolf thinking aboutthe three crossword answers and the way she had described me with almost no evidence at all.

I returned twice more that week.

The first time, I told myself it was to verify signal integrity after a storm rattled the building hard enough to create false motion alerts on the fire escape.

The second time, I told myself Orlov traffic had shifted near her block, and I needed visual confirmation that nothing had been planted outside her window. Both reasons were true, but neither was the whole truth.

By the third visit, I stopped writing justifications down. That was the beginning of the real problem, which was that each time I entered Kit Calloway’s apartment, it became harder to pretend I was only making sure she survived.

I wanted her alive, but a part of me was growing with each passing day.

I wanted her.

Over my knee with her bottom bright red.