Chapter 2 #2
Then she did something that made me go very still. She didn’t go dark. She started setting traps.
I stared at the screen for a long moment, and then I smiled.
“Well,” I murmured to the empty room. “Hello, you.”
Within the hour, I knew the ghost was in Boston and not long after that, I knew she was a freelancer.
It was shortly after midnight when I found her name.
Kit Calloway.
Not Katherine, though the legal record used that version in places she clearly disliked and avoided whenever possible. Kit. Short, cute, memorable. Terrible operational choice, really. Unique names were hooks. Hooks caught things.
In this case, me.
She worked under Calloway Security Consulting, a purposefully boring business name that made me like her more than I wanted to. Her client list was small, private, and carefully scrubbed, but not carefully enough for me.
No one scrubbed carefully enough for me.
The Orlov contract stood out because she had buried it deeper than the others, which interested me immediately. The invoice had been paid seventeen days earlier. The engagement was marked closed. Final deliverables sent. Professional obligation complete. And yet she was still there.
Still watching. Still mapping their shells. Still building timelines. Still following money through dead companies and offshore routes with the stubbornness of someone who had stopped caring whether there was a paycheck at the end of the work.
That was when my curiosity transformed into concern.
Professionals stopped when the contract ended. Smart professionals stopped when the name Orlov appeared. Surviving professionals stopped when Mikhail Orlov’s network started looking back at them.
Kit Calloway had done none of those things.
I built the first dossier because that was what the situation required. I told myself that more than once. Lone female inside hostile infrastructure. Potential liability to Morozov operations. Possible law enforcement proxy. Possible Orlov bait. Assess, classify, contain.
By the end of the first twenty-four hours, I had her address.
She lived on the fourth floor of a converted brick building with old pipes, uneven hallway lighting, and a front security camera that had been installed by someone who considered the concept of angles optional.
Her building management company had ignored three maintenance requests about the rear entrance camera.
She had filed two of them herself, then stopped, which told me she had either given up on the official process or fixed the problem in another way.
I suspected the latter.
By hour thirty, I knew her sleep schedule was atrocious.
She went still around five in the morning most days, which I only counted as sleep because her systems entered a reduced activity pattern and her phone stopped moving for longer than ninety minutes.
She woke too soon. She drank coffee at hours that suggested either discipline or self-destruction.
Possibly both. She worked best after midnight.
Her outgoing traffic spiked when the city quieted late at night.
By hour thirty-six, I knew about Evan.
Evan was a mistake with good hair and poor boundaries. I disliked him immediately, though I had no operational reason to have an opinion on the man beyond the fact that he texted her too late and too often.
You awake?
That was the type of message sent by a man who had not yet accepted that silence was also an answer.
She ignored him most of the time. Sometimes she answered with one word. Once, at 2:04 in the morning, she sent simply, No.
I liked that.
I liked it more than was appropriate.
I flagged Evan as low threat but persistent. Then I flagged him again under personal nuisance, a category I absolutely did not need and created anyway.
By hour forty, I found her brother Daniel.
Until then, Kit Calloway had been a problem made of data. Interesting, certainly. Skilled, definitely. Reckless enough to require monitoring. But still a set of variables arranged around my work. Name, location, habits, access, risk.
Daniel Calloway made her someone real.
The police file was old and thin. It noted an abandoned car near the Mystic aquarium, with blood on the steering wheel.
There wasn’t enough for a body, but there was too much for comfort.
It listed a last known contact with a colleague, as well as a witness statement that shifted between the first interview and the second, and there was one mention of a Russian accent that vanished from the official summary days later.
This all happened seven years ago.
I sat in the cold light of the security suite and read everything twice.
Daniel had been a forensic accountant. Quiet, careful, no criminal record, no debt that mattered, no mistress, no gambling, no convenient vice the police could use to turn him into the sort of man who vanished because he deserved it.
Two weeks before he disappeared, he had texted his sister.
I think I found something I wasn’t supposed to find.
Calling Maxim would have been the correct thing to do.
Unknown civilian contractor with personal motive digging into Orlov financial infrastructure.
Possible exposure. Possible witness to historic Bratva-adjacent activity.
Possible leverage point for Mikhail if he discovered her. My family probably should know.
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 look human. 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.
I batted it away. “I will break into your phone and set your alarm to play Italian opera every morning at 6:00 a.m. for a month.”
He grinned. “Joke’s on you. Sloane would like that.”
“She would not.”
“She might.”
“She has good taste,” Aleksei murmured.
Nikolai pointed at him. “Stay out of this, gallery boy.”
The room softened for half a second with familiar irritation and brotherly noise, but Maxim didn’t join it. He kept watching me.
After the meeting ended, he waited until Nikolai and Aleksei had drifted toward the bar and Sergei had stepped away to take a call near the hall. Then he poured two fingers of vodka into my glass and slid it toward me.
I did not touch it.
“That bad?” he asked.
I looked at him and sighed.