Chapter 2 #3
Maxim Morozov was many things. He was ruthless, controlled, and occasionally insufferable, but never careless.
Like eldest brothers often did, they confused age with omniscience, despite being annoyingly right a considerable amount of the time.
If I told him there was a woman standing too close to Orlov fire, he would ask her name.
Then he would ask why I had waited to say it.
Then he would put her on a board, in a plan, under protection, and inside the machinery of our family before I had decided what she was to me.
I wasn’t ready for that. Worse, I didn’t want it.
That should have told me everything.
Instead, I picked up the glass. “The Orlov network has another set of eyes on it,” I said.
His expression sharpened immediately. “Whose?”
“I’m still confirming,” I lied.
It wasn’t quite a full lie. There were always things to confirm. But close enough that it sat badly in my mouth.
“Government?” Maxim asked.
“No.”
“Orlov?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
I took a drink, buying myself three seconds I didn’t need.
“A contractor, maybe. Someone careful.”
Maxim leaned back. “Careful enough to concern you?”
“Yes.”
That was at least honest.
“And dangerous?”
I thought of her traps. Her discipline. Her stubborn refusal to retreat from a threat she did not fully understand. I thought of Daniel Calloway and a bloodstained steering wheel. I thought of Mikhail’s people finding her apartment before she knew enough to run.
“To herself,” I said.
Maxim’s gaze narrowed again. “That is not what I asked.”
“It is the part that matters tonight.”
Maxim was not fooled. I knew it. He knew I knew it. That was the irritating thing about family; they made deception inefficient.
Finally, he said, “Do not let a variable become a weakness.”
I smiled faintly. “I would never.”
He did not smile back. “Ivan.”
“I’m handling it,” I said again.
“Good,” he said, but his gaze said he believed otherwise.
I left the Iron Wolf just after midnight.
Boston was wet and black beneath the streetlights, the pavement shining like spilled ink.
The air smelled like rain, exhaust, and the ocean somewhere beyond the buildings.
I should have gone home, written up a report, sent it to Maxim with Kit Calloway’s name at the top and gone to bed.
Instead, I sat in the back of my car outside the tavern, tablet balanced on one knee and opened her file.
The live monitor showed nothing dramatic. Just the soft movements of a woman who knew someone was near and refused to show fear.
A new note appeared in her workspace.
Watcher.
I stared at the word and felt something low and possessive curl tight beneath my ribs.
She had named me.
She didn’t know my face. She didn’t know my name. She didn’t know that the man she had reduced to one word was sitting in the dark outside the Iron Wolf with his brothers’ voices still echoing in his head and her life open in his hands.
She didn’t know that I had seen the cold case.
She didn’t know that I had read the name Daniel Calloway and understood, with a clarity that annoyed me, that she would not stop.
Not because she was reckless, though she was.
Not because she was foolish, because she absolutely was not.
But because stopping would feel like letting her brother die twice.
I understood loyalty like that.
I understood wounds that became part of you like that.
The file on my screen shifted as one of her traps activated fully. A pretty little cage, sharp at the edges and patient in the center. She had built it for me without knowing it was mine to admire.
“Clever girl,” I murmured.
The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror, then quickly looked away because my men were well trained and not suicidal. I closed the false lead without touching it, leaving no indication that I had seen the trap at all. Then I made a note in her file.
Subject is aware of unknown surveillance. Did not disengage. Set lure at 04:07. High competence. High persistence. High risk.
I paused, fingers hovering over the screen.
Then I added another line.
Do not underestimate her.
That was sound operational advice.
I stared at the words for a long time while rain tapped softly against the car roof. In the reflection of the tablet, my face looked calm. Tired, maybe. Amused around the edges if someone knew me well enough to see it. Nothing more.
Good.
Because the thing moving under my skin was not calm.
I had known her as data first. As an intrusion, a route, a pattern, a name in a registry, a woman with bad sleep and better instincts. I had known her risk profile before I knew her grief. That should have made her less dangerous to me, but it did not.
It made her real.
Kit Calloway sat in her apartment somewhere across the city, building traps for a man she had not met, while Mikhail Orlov’s shadow stretched closer to her door with every hour she stayed inside his systems.
She thought she was hunting alone.
She was wrong.
I turned off the tablet and slipped it back inside my jacket, close enough that I could feel the hard edge of it against my chest.
This was operational assessment, I told myself.
Protection of Morozov interests.
Risk containment.
Threat management.
All very reasonable.
All very logically sound.
Then I looked out at Boston, toward the part of the city where her apartment waited in the dark, and the word came anyway.
Mine.
I did not correct it.