Page 71 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“It was an observation.”

“People who say that usually mean insult.”

“People who say that usually make lazy observations.”

The corner of my mouth twitched before I could stop it and his eyes warmed at the sight.

We were not flirting. Probably. Or if we were, it was the strangest version of flirting I had ever encountered. No compliments about my appearance. No obvious charm. No trying too hard. Just two people sitting across from each other with coffee and knives under every sentence. And somehow, I felt more seen than I had during entire relationships.

That bothered me.

Evan had once told me I was hard to read, like it was my job to become easier. Ivan seemed to read the hard parts and find the difficulty interesting. Worse, he did not look proud of himself for doing it.

“You need to be careful,” he said, his voice full of warning.

“I’m always careful.”

“No. You are thorough. It is not the same thing.”

My first response was anger. Quick, bright, incredibly useful. I wanted to tell him exactly how careful I was, how many systems I had in place, how much of my life had been arranged around the assumption that danger would eventually come looking. I wanted to ask who the hell he thought he was, sitting across from me after one professional introduction and telling me where I was exposed.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I said instead.

“No, you won’t.”

I stared at him as he picked up his coffee.

The absolute audacity.

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“You will hear me. You will file it. You will dislike that it may be true. Then you will continue, won’t you?”

I should have left and told him he was presumptuous, rude, and alarmingly comfortable making statements about my life after less than an hour of total conversation. Instead, I just sat there and felt a familiar warmth move low in my stomach.

Desire.

I hated it immediately.

“You make a habit of telling women what they’re going to do?” I asked.

“Only when they have already decided.”

“And what have I decided?”

“That stopping would feel like surrender.”

The café disappeared for one second. Not literally. The world stayed like it was. Steam still hissed from the espresso machine. Someone still complained about a scone. A barista still called out a name that sounded like Molly or maybe Polly, because apparently everyone in coffee shops was required to mumble. But inside me, a few things locked into place.

Daniel’s file and his car and the blood dried across the steering wheel, the witness who had somehow forgotten the Russian accent, the years of being told to stop calling. The board was still up on my apartment wall with its red string pulled tight between the pins, the old case I had never let die, because letting it die would have meant leaving him there, frozen forever in the space between missing and murdered.

Stopping would feel like surrender.

Ivan could not know that. He could not.

My voice came out quieter. “That is a very specific guess.”

“Yes.”