Page 33 of Hunt Me

Whether I want him to make good on that threat about my mattress.

I scrub my hands over my face. Get it together, Mitchell.

My fingers fly across the keyboard, executing cleanup protocols I could do in my sleep. Except my mind keeps drifting—to Alexi’s thumb against my pulse, his hips grinding forward, that low voice promising he’d never stop hunting me.

A notification pops up. System trace initiated.

My blood turns to ice.

They’re tracking the breach. Right now. Following my digital footprints back through the network.

The trace splits into three branches, each probing a different exit point.

Amateur hour.

My pulse steadies. The panic crystallizes into sharp focus, muscle memory from years of NSA training taking over. I watch the trace crawl through the network, identifying the algorithms they’re using. Standard DoD protocols. The same ones I helped design when I was nineteen.

Poor bastards.

I open a second terminal, fingers moving faster than thought. The trace follows breadcrumbs I left—intentional vulnerabilities in my cleanup that appear to be mistakes. Rookie errors. The kind of sloppiness that screams an inexperienced hacker is in over their head.

They’ll follow those. They always do.

Meanwhile, I built a ghost image of my actual intrusion, fragmenting it across seventeen servers scattered across Eastern Europe. Each fragment looks like unrelated traffic. Random data packets that mean nothing on their own.

The trace locks onto my first decoy. A burner server in Morocco that I maintain for exactly this purpose.

“Come on,” I mutter, watching them commit resources to the wrong target. “Take the bait.”

They do.

The second trace branch veers toward a dead drop in Singapore. The third keeps searching, probing for my real signature.

That one’s smart. That one knows what to look for.

I feed it corrupted data packets, fragments of code that suggest I’m bouncing through the Tor network. Misdirection layered on top of misdirection, each false trail requiring just enough effort to crack that they’ll believe they’re getting somewhere.

The third trace commits. Follows my ghost into the dark web.

I exhale slowly, waiting. Watching. Making sure no fourth trace appears, no hidden protocol I missed.

Nothing.

My hands don’t shake as I execute the final cleanup, erasing my ghost image piece by piece. The DoD team will spend weeks chasing phantoms through dead servers, finding nothing but their own confusion.

By the time they realize they’ve been played, the original breach will be buried under so much noise they’ll never reconstruct it.

I close the laptop. Stand. Walk to the window on legs that barely hold me.

My reflection stares back—pale skin, dark circles under my eyes. I look like my mother did, those last few months before the accident. Before the cover-up.

Before everything.

My phone buzzes. A text from an unknown number.

Looking forward to tonight, Iris. Wear something that won’t slow you down when you try to run.

I stare at the message, jaw tight.