Page 16 of Hunt Me

Dmitri’s already out the door before I catch up. “This better be good.”

“It’s not.” He doesn’t slow down, heading for the private conference room off the main ballroom. “The Phantom just dumped our entire Frankfurt server architecture on the dark web.”

My stomach drops. “What?”

“Thirty seconds ago. Complete system breakdown. Every backup protocol, every failsafe—all of it public.” He opens the door to reveal Nikolai pacing, phone pressed to his ear.

“How?” I’m already pulling out my laptop, fingers flying across keys before I’m even seated. “I had triple encryption on those servers.”

“Clearly not enough.” Nikolai ends his call, face like granite. “Fix it.”

The code sprawls across my screen—elegant, vicious, perfectly executed. The Phantom didn’t just breach our system. They dissected it, understood every layer, and dismantled it with surgical precision.

“Son of a bitch.” I trace the attack vector, following digital breadcrumbs backward. “They’ve been inside for weeks. This whole time I thought I was chasing them; they were studying us.”

“Can you contain it?” Dmitri leans over my shoulder.

“I can try.” My fingers blur across the keyboard, deploying emergency protocols. “But they planned this. See here? They left backdoors in systems I haven’t even activated yet. They knew exactly where we’d pivot.”

Thirty minutes bleeds into forty-five. I reroute traffic, close vulnerabilities, and rebuild firewalls on the fly. The Phantom’s signature mocks me from every compromised line of code.

“There.” I slam the laptop shut. “Servers are isolated. Damage is done, but they can’t get deeper.”

“Good.” Nikolai straightens his cufflinks. “Now get back out there before anyone notices we’ve all disappeared.”

Right. The gala.

Iris.

I shove my laptop at Dmitri and bolt back to the ballroom, scanning for black dress and platinum hair. The crowd has thinned—it’s past midnight now. Small clusters remain, the diehards who turn every event into an excuse to drink.

No Iris.

I circle the entire room twice. Check the bathrooms. The coat check. The balcony overlooking the city.

Nothing.

She’s gone.

“Looking for someone?” Tash appears at my elbow, a knowing smile firmly in place.

“The woman I was talking to. Black dress, blonde?—”

“The blonde?” She sips champagne. “Saw her slip out of the entrance not long after you left, and she didn’t come back.”

Of course she did. You can run, Iris, but I’ll find you, and next time you won’t brush me off.

6

IRIS

The Uber drops me three blocks from my apartment—habit more than caution. My heels click against wet pavement, Boston’s perpetual autumn drizzle misting my hair.

I shouldn’t have gone to the gala.

Risky. Unnecessary. A goddamn power trip watching Alexi Ivanov squirm while I dismantled his Frankfurt servers in real-time. But the look on his face when he’d spotted me across that ballroom—intrigue without understanding—made every risk worth it.

My phone buzzes. Maya.