Page 32 of Hunt Me

Silence stretches between us. Her pulse hammers against my chest—or maybe that’s mine. Hard to tell where I end and she begins right now.

“Fine.” The word comes out strangled. “One date.”

Triumph surges through me. “Smart girl.”

“But if you try anything?—”

“I’ll pick you up at eight.” I step back, giving her space. Cool air rushes between us. “1247 Commonwealth Avenue, Unit 4 B. I’ll even bring flowers.”

She straightens, tugging her laptop bag higher on her shoulder. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.” I retrieve her pepper spray from the pavement, hand it back. “You just hate that you don’t.”

10

IRIS

The encryption breaks at 2:47 PM.

I lean back, rolling my shoulders. Standard corporate espionage job—find out if the CEO’s embezzling, get proof, get paid. Easy money. The kind of work that pays my rent while I plan my next move against the Ivanov brothers.

Against Alexi.

My fingers hesitate over the keyboard. Less than six hours until he shows up at my door. Less than six hours to figure out what the hell I’m doing, agreeing to have dinner with a man who cornered me in an alley and threatened to?—

Focus.

I dive into the next directory, fingers flying across keys. Financial records. Board meeting minutes. Nothing interesting.

Then I hit the subsidiary files.

The folder structure changes. Tighter encryption. Military-grade protocols that have no business being in a pharmaceutical company’s servers.

Red flags everywhere.

I should stop. Log out. Pretend I never saw this.

But my hands keep moving, muscle memory overriding common sense. Just a quick look. Just enough to confirm what this is before I bail.

The first document loads.

Department of Defense. Project Nightshade. Classified.

Ice floods my veins.

No. No.

I slam the laptop shut, heart hammering against my ribs. Fuck. Fuck.

Government systems. I just breached government systems.

The same kind of breach that got my parents killed.

My hands shake as I reopen the laptop, force myself to think through the panic. Backtrack. Clean the logs. Erase every trace that I was ever here.

The cursor blinks at me, mocking.

Because I was sloppy. Because I’ve been distracted, thinking about green eyes and sharp smiles and the weight of a body pinning me against a brick wall. Because instead of running my usual checks, I’ve been obsessing over what to wear tonight, whether to cancel, and whether I want to cancel.