Page 85 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Me:Not yet.

Sergei:That window is getting smaller too.

I stared at the message and almost smiled.

Yes. Every window was getting smaller. Orlov’s. Maxim’s. Mine. Kit Calloway’s most of all.

I looked once more at her dark window and let the truth settle fully, cold and certain and inescapable.

She would not obey me easily, but I did not want easy.

I wanted Kit Calloway exactly as she was, brilliant, furious, impossible, and alive. But if she thought I would let her walk herself into Mikhail Orlov’s hands because she disliked being managed, then my clever girl was about to learn something important.

Daddy could be very patient.

Daddy could be very kind.

And when necessary, Daddy could be very,veryfirm.

CHAPTER 16

Kit

I didn’t sleep after Ivan Morozov told me the Orlovs had my name.

That seemed worth noting, if only because sleep had already been more of a polite rumor than a habit lately. Still, there was a difference between refusing sleep because work had its teeth in you and lying in bed while every sound in your apartment became part of a potential threat.

The radiator hissed and a pipe knocked in the wall. Someone coughed in the hallway. A car idled too long beneath my window, then left before I could decide whether to hate it personally or professionally.

By five, I had stopped pretending I was resting and had moved to the couch with my back to the brick wall, laptop closed on the coffee table because Ivan’s warning had done exactly what a good warning was supposed to do. It made touching the Orlov file feel less like work and more like sticking my hand into a machine while the gears were still moving.

I hated that.

I hated that I had listened.

Mostly, I hated that he had been right about why I wouldn’t want to.

Fear made me want more information. Information made me feel less helpless. Helplessness made my skin feel too tight, like I needed to claw my way out of my own body before someone else got to me first.

So I sat still, which was its own kind of violence.

My apartment looked exactly the same as it always did, which had started to feel personally offensive. It was quiet too. Too quiet. Ivan’s voice kept moving through the room even though the call had ended hours ago.

It also did other things and that was the real problem. My body had become a traitor with terrible judgment and apparently a deep interest in Russian men who said ‘consequences’ like it meant something more specific than punishment and less simple than sex.

I tried not to think about his voice.

That worked for approximately nine seconds.

Then I thought about his hand. Not even his hand doing anything useful or dramatic. Just his hand on his coffee cup at the café. He had touched nothing unnecessarily, which made the idea of him touching me feel like it would be deliberate enough to ruin my life.

Completely unacceptable.

I got up, paced the apartment, checked the hallway feed, checked the window, checked the lock, then went into the bathroom because apparently my options had narrowed to ‘spiral on couch’ or ‘spiral somewhere with tile.’

The mirror over the sink reflected a woman who looked like she’d been professionally haunted. Pale face. Dark hair loose around my shoulders. Eyes bloodshot. Mouth set in the particular line that meant I was very close to making either an excellent decision or a catastrophic one.

I turned the shower on hot.