Page 10 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I did not call Maxim.

Instead, I pulled every public record tied to Daniel Calloway. I traced the old firm he worked for, the clients they never admitted they had, the dead accounts that had moved money through shells long since dissolved. I found enough smoke to believe there had once been fire, but not enough to know who had lit it.

Kit had found more.

Not all of it. Not enough. But more than she should have.

I studied the work she had left behind in the systems she touched. She was careful, but every careful person had a shape. Hers was exacting. Suspicious. Patient. She didn’t trust the first answer a system gave her. She circled it, tested it, forced it to confess from three directions before she wrote anything down.

Good girl.

The thought came uninvited, quiet and dark and I sat back so quickly my chair rolled an inch.

No.

I couldn’t be thinking that.

This was an operational assessment.

She was exposed, and exposure was dangerous. She was inside Orlov sightlines, and if Mikhail’s people had not yet noticed her, they would. That was the concern. That was why I kept watching her. That was why I began building a private file separate from the Orlov archive, one with her name on it, one no one else had access to.

This wasn’t obsession. This was documentation, which was an important distinction.

I named the folder KC_Assessment because I was not a dramatic man.

Then I opened it forty-seven times in six hours.

By the time I finally stood from the console, my neck ached and two untouched coffees had gone cold beside me. Outside, Boston had turned from black to gray to washed-out morning, the sort of light that made the city look bleak. I should be sleeping. Instead, I watched a narrow slice of network traffic coming from her apartment settle into a familiar rhythm.

She was awake again.

At 4:07, she seeded her first lure.

I almost laughed because it was good. A fake Orlov lead tied to Providence logistics, dressed with just enough sloppiness to lookhuman. She had made it tempting without making it obvious, which was harder than most people understood.

It wasn’t an accident.

She wanted me to see it.

No, not me specifically. The unknown. The anomaly. The watcher she had not named yet, though I suspected she would. Women like Kit Calloway named threats. It helped them put a blade in the right place.

I did not take the bait.

Obviously.

But I examined the edges of it long enough to admire the construction.

That was the problem with clever women. A foolish woman made a man feel powerful. A clever one made him feel awake.

Kit Calloway had made me feel very awake.

When I returned to the Iron Wolf that night, I had been awake for nearly two days, but exhaustion wasn’t the reason I could not follow the meeting. I had worked longer on less sleep. I had traced kidnappers with a fever, cracked financial records after being stitched up, and once rebuilt a destroyed server map while Nikolai shouted threats at a man tied to a chair six feet away.

This was different.

My body was in the back room with my brothers, but my head was in a fourth-floor apartment with a woman who drank cold coffee, ignored men who didn’t deserve her attention, and kept digging into monsters because one of them might have killed her brother.

“Earth to Ivan,” Nikolai said, waving a hand in front of my face.