Page 18 of Hunt Me

I rest my head on her shoulder, breathing in her familiar lavender shampoo. Maya’s right. She’s always right. But something about Alexi Ivanov gets under my skin, makes me want to abandon careful planning for chaos.

“He called me intriguing,” I murmur.

Maya snorts. “You are intriguing. You’re also a felony waiting to happen.” She shifts, looks at me directly. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Truly careful, not Iris Mitchell careful.”

“There’s a difference?”

“You know there is.”

I do know that. Because careful died with my parents when I was nineteen.

Before the “accident,” I played by the rules. Followed procedures. Believed systems worked if you trusted them. Then I was in a car wreck with my parents after a brake failure that didn’t match the physics, and my world turned upside down.

I’d already been gifted with computers, with math—child prodigy nonsense that got me into Stanford at sixteen. But after my parents died, coding became something else. A weapon. A way to pry open doors that kept slamming in my face.

Every investigation into their deaths hit a wall. Police reports vanished. Witnesses recanted. Security footage got corrupted. The kind of coordinated erasure that screamed cover-up to anyone paying attention.

So, I learned to hack. Not the script-kiddie garbage, but real penetration—breaking encryption, spoofing credentials, becoming invisible inside networks that were considered secure. Mathematics had always made sense to me in ways people never did. Code was just math with purpose, and my purpose was simple.

Find out who killed my parents and why.

The Ivanov name surfaced six months into my digging. Buried in fragmented emails, offshore account transfers, and a single reference to “the Boston problem” dated two days before my parents’ car went off that bridge. Not proof—never enough proof—but threads I’ve been following ever since.

“Iris.” Maya’s voice pulls me back. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Disappearing into your head.” She squeezes my hand harder. “I can practically hear you planning your next move.”

I blink, refocus on her concerned face. “I’m not?—”

“You are.” Maya sighs. “Look, I get it. I know why you do this. But one day your luck’s going to run out, and then what? You’ll be too dead to get your answers.”

“Dramatic much?”

“Realistic much.” She stands, pulling me up with her. “Come on. You need actual sleep, not whatever pill-induced coma you’ve been doing.”

I let her tug me toward my bedroom, knowing she won’t rest until I’m in bed. Knowing she’s right about the recklessness, about the danger.

Knowing I’ll do it anyway.

7

ALEXI

I’ve watched the security footage forty-seven times.

Forty-seven loops of absolutely nothing.

The gala’s surveillance system shows a perfect evening. Guests arriving, champagne flowing, the usual parade of Boston’s elite pretending their money is clean. But the blonde? The one who stripped me bare with words while simultaneously gutting my servers?

And I have a feeling she’s the same blonde from the MIT café.

She doesn’t exist.

No entry timestamp. No exit. Not a single frame of her talking to me, those ice-blue eyes tracking my every reaction like she was cataloging weaknesses.

Because it was all fake. Every camera reveals exactly what she wanted me to see while she walked through that ballroom like a ghost.