Page 74 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I had known it at the café, sitting across from her while she tested me with a false statement about her own work and waited to see if I would correct her. I had watched the little trap slide across the table between us, neat and quiet and so very Kit that my cock had stirred beneath the table before I had any right to feel anything except professional concern. She had wanted to see if I would bite.

I hadn’t.

Instead, I had asked the question that proved I knew the premise was wrong and let her notice. Her eyes had flashed with understanding. Her mouth had tightened around a smile she did not give me. She had filed me away.

Good girl.

The thought came now with heat.

She needed a man patient enough not to correct every mistake the second she made it, but firm enough to stop her when correction became survival. She needed someone who could sit across from her and let her test the edges of his control without taking it personally. Someone who would feed her when she forgot she had a body, take the laptop out of her hands when exhaustion became a weapon she aimed at herself, lock the doors she missed, and put her over his knee when she decided danger was acceptable as long as she could name it first.

My hand flexed.

Daddy will take care of you, little ghost hunter.

My body reacted hard enough that I had to close my eyes for a second.

This was not the time. Except it was all the time now. Wanting her was no longer a separate problem from keeping her alive. It had fused somewhere between the first anomaly and the way she said my name in the café. I wanted her safe with the same vicious intensity I wanted her naked. I wanted her breathing under my protection, furious and eventually pliant under my firm hand, curled up in my bed, fed, watched, held, disciplined when she needed it, and praised when she earned it.

She needed a daddy.

That word should have sounded ridiculous in the cold light of my apartment with Orlov muscle moving toward her address.

It did not. It sounded inevitable.

I was going to be her daddy.

First, though, I had to keep her alive long enough for her to hate me properly.

So I made a false trail where a fake Kit Calloway checked into a Chicago hotel that existed, under a reservation created through a card that would survive a shallow investigation and fail only after I wanted it to.

Within the hour, Mikhail’s people believed their Boston address had gone cold because their target had moved.

I didn’t make her disappear. I just moved her. A moving target created urgency and sloppy decisions. A vanished one created suspicion. I gave them urgency.

Then I gave them something to chase.

I had bought Kit another window, but I knew that it was smaller than the last one. That fact sat beneath my ribs like a blade turned sideways.

When I got back to the Iron Wolf, Sergei was waiting in the back hallway. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, expression flat, green eyes awake in the dim amber light. The tavern was closed, the main room quiet except for the low hum of the refrigerators behind the bar and the occasional creak of old wood settling. In that silence, Sergei looked less like a brother and more like judgment that had learned to stand upright.

“You still going at this alone,” he said.

“Good morning to you as well.”

“It is not morning.”

“It is after three. That is morning for responsible criminals.”

His eyes moved over my coat, my gloves, the small black case in my hand. “Orlov?”

I did not answer.

His mouth tightened by one degree. “Ivan.”

“I handled it.”

“That is what you say before things stop being handled.”