Graph-based retrieval is effective for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), but retrieving the correct reasoning path remains challenging in multi-hop settings because the retrieval objective changes as reasoning progresses. Existing methods often address this issue with repeated LLM-based planning, which improves adaptivity but increases inference cost. We present a training-free residual-guided retrieval framework that updates the retrieval signal according to the current reasoning path in embedding space. The method performs multi-hop graph retrieval without repeated hop-wise LLM calls and invokes the LLM only once for final answer generation. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ show that our method achieves superior Hit rates with only a single LLM call. Additional comparisons with supervised graph-based KGQA methods show that the proposed method remains effective without task-specific training data. These results suggest that residual-guided retrieval is an efficient alternative for multi-hop graph-based question answering.