Page 61 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“Look at you,” he murmured. “So beautiful when you come undone.”

I felt a surge of something that was dangerously close to adoration. It was terrifying enough that I pushed away from him, my hands shaking as I scrambled to refasten my slacks. I couldn’t look at him. If I looked at him, I would do something stupid like beg him to do it again.

He let me go.

He simply stepped aside and watched me with that unnerving stillness.

I smoothed my blouse. I ran a hand through my hair. I tried to find a semblance of the person I’d been ten minutes ago and not the woman who got fingered in the women’s restroom by a Russian mobster with unnervingly blue eyes and too much patience, but she was gone.

“I have to go,” I said, my voice hoarse.

“Yes.”

He said it like nothing had happened.

I opened my mouth and closed it, quickly discovering that there was no arrangement of words that would let me walk out of that restroom with my dignity intact, so I picked up the bag I didn’t remember dropping and left without a single word.

The workshop was fine, but I remembered almost none of it. For forty minutes, I sat in a chair too close to the front and pretended to take notes while my body replayed what had happened in the restroom. By the time I left the workshop, Ivan was gone. I checked the hallway casually, then less casually, then hated myself enough to stop. The conference continued around me. People moving through professional lives with no idea that mine had just tilted by a few degrees.

I should have felt like I’d met a stranger, but I didn’t.

That was the thing I could not make fit. Ivan Morozov was new data. A first contact. A professional introduction facilitated by a researcher I trusted. A man with a familiar last name, a controlled voice, an annoyingly patient stare and expert hands, and questions intelligent enough to cut through answers I hadn’t even decided to give. He should have been a file I had just opened. Instead, he felt like one I had been writing for weeks.

That thought stayed with me all the way back to my apartment. I walked past shop windows and checked reflections automatically. I watched dark glass, car doors, polished lobby panels, and the black screen of my phone. The city looked normal. When I reached my building, the corrected security light above the front door flickered on in the early dusk while Ivan Morozov’s voice moved through my head.

I had let a man I’d known for two hours back me into a corner of a restroom and put his hand down my pants, and I had not stopped him. That was not the part that frightened me. The part that frightened me was that I hadn’t wanted to stop him. I had stood there with every alarm bell I owned going off at once—stranger, unknown, no exit, no read on him—and some quieter system underneath all of them had looked at the situation and voted, decisively, against my own training.

I did not lose control. That was the whole point of me. I had built an entire life on not being the woman who came apart against a sink in a building full of people, and I had been her anyway, and worse, I had walked out and sat through forty minutes of a workshop on threat modeling like my body wasn’t still humming from the best orgasm I’d had in what was maybe forever.

I knew what I was supposed to do with information like that. Log it. Flag it. Treat the lapse as a vulnerability and patch it.

I stood on the sidewalk for one second too long, then went inside. I did not open the Watcher file immediately, which should have frightened me. Instead, I sat at my desk, opened a new note, and typed one line.

Ivan Morozov—somehow feels familiar.

I stared at it.

Then I added:

Find out why.

CHAPTER 13

Ivan

I had prepared for Kit Calloway to be clever.

Preparation made men arrogant. It made them believe that because they had mapped enough variables, the thing in front of them would behave according to the model. I knew better. I had built my life on knowing better. No system survived contact with a live adversary unchanged, and no dataset, however thorough, could account for the exact moment a woman looked directly at you and became more than everything you had learned about her.

Still, I had thought I was prepared.

I wasn’t.

What I had not accounted for was the way she tilted her head when she was deciding whether to trust something. It was small. Barely there. She did it when I asked about the story that changed when she looked away. She did it again when I told her Mara respected her.

I had not accounted for the way she laughed either. It was fast, surprised, almost bitten off before it could become evidence. As though the sound escaped without clearance from whatever part of her controlled classified output. It was not loud. It did not ask to be admired. It existed for less than a second and then disappeared behind that tight, disciplined mouth of hers.

I wanted to hear it again immediately.