Page 39 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I stared at the monitor in the blue dark of my security suite and understood something simple.

Seventy-two hours was not time.

It was a countdown.

The Orlov analyst who found the trail was not terrible. That irritated me. Terrible would have been easier. Terrible analysts walked straight into planted doors, left fingerprints everywhere, and celebrated too soon. This one had learned caution from someone better than him.

He had three names on a draft list.

Hers was not there.

Yet.

Calloway Security Consulting would appear if he kept narrowing by specialty, invoice trail, and timing. I knew that because I had already done it. I knew exactly how many steps stood between his current map and the woman sleeping poorly in a fourth-floor apartment across Boston with my hardware hidden near her windows and one of her cheap blue pens in my jacket pocket.

Four steps if he was careful.

Two if he was lucky.

One if God had a cruel sense of humor.

I leaned back in my chair. The server cabinets hummed behind the glass wall. The monitors cast pale light over the desk, over the untouched coffee beside my keyboard, over the pen I hadplaced there because putting it in a drawer felt too much like admitting it was stolen.

Everything about this was ridiculous.

A Russian Bratva analyst losing sleep over a woman who would probably stab him if she knew what he was doing.

I picked up the pen, turned it once between my fingers, then set it down again.

“Focus,” I told myself.

For once, I listened. I did not erase the Orlov trail. Instead, I redirected one breadcrumb into three. Then five. Then nine. I gave him consultants with similar methods, similar timing, similar access patterns. I dressed the false routes with enough human inconsistency to feel real because perfect lies often smelled like men who thought too highly of themselves. One path suggested a retired federal contractor in Virginia. Another pointed toward a boutique security outfit in Seattle. The most tempting one led to Boston, but not to Kit.

It led to a vacant unit above a defunct print shop in Allston, leased through a shell company I controlled and tied to a woman who did not exist outside tax records, two conference registrations, and a handful of stale breach disclosures I had written twelve minutes earlier.

Kara Caldwell.

I gave Kara a professional website so bland it hurt my feelings. I gave her archived talks at industry events no one attended and three former clients that would hold under shallow verification. I gave her a payment trail messy enough to look authentic anda login behavior pattern that matched the Orlov intrusion if the analyst wanted it to.

That was the important part. People believed lies most readily when the lie complimented their intelligence.

An hour later, the Orlov analyst had found Kara and a few minutes later, he had moved Kit off the primary vector without realizing she had been there in the first place, which was good, but it wasn’t enough for me.

I had bought Kit time, although I did not know how much.

I spent the rest of the day working on strengthening the Kara Caldwell trail until I was finally satisfied that it would hold for some time. I spent two hours after that removing several cameras I found that were watching Kit’s apartment building and one at her café. At 7:30 that evening, I went to the Iron Wolf. The tavern was already loud when I arrived, the front room glowing amber and red, all polished mahogany, velvet, vodka, and controlled sin. The Iron Wolf had always been our family’s kingdom more than any office or estate. Men laughed louder there because they wanted to look unafraid. Women leaned closer because they knew danger wore good cologne in that room. Deals moved in murmurs beneath the music. Threats slipped between drinks.

It was home, in other words.

Nikolai was at the bar when I walked in, taking up enough space to qualify as furniture. He had one arm braced against the counter, the other holding a glass that looked fragile in his fingers. Aleksei sat beside him in a suit that probably cost more than the car the bartender drove. Sergei leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes on the front door, becauseSergei’s idea of relaxation was finding the nearest threat and silently judging it.

I did not see Maxim, which meant he was in the back room already and probably irritated.

Lovely.

Nikolai spotted me first and grinned. “There he is. You look like you’ve been awake for three days and lost an argument with a spreadsheet.”

“I never lose arguments with spreadsheets,” I said, removing my glasses to clean them with the edge of my sleeve. “They are one of the few things in this family that respond appropriately to logic.”