Page 5 of Hunt Me

I take a sip of espresso, bitter and scalding. Perfect.

That’s when I feel it.

Eyes. On me.

Not the usual bullshit—the college girls who recognize the Ivanov name from gossip sites or daddy’s business dealings. Not the campus security guards who’ve learned to give me a wide berth after I hacked their facial recognition system last semester.

This is different.

The weight of a gaze that knows exactly what it’s looking at. Assessing. Calculating.

Predatory.

My shoulders tense despite my best effort to appear relaxed. I’ve felt this before—in Bratva meetings when enemies pretend to be allies.

But here? At a fucking MIT café surrounded by stressed freshmen and burned-out grad students?

I resist the urge to scan the room immediately. That’s amateur hour, showing your hand before you’ve figured out the game. Instead, I take another sip of espresso, let my eyes drift casually over my screen while my peripheral vision works overtime.

Tables full of students hunched over textbooks. A group of engineering majors arguing about quantum mechanics. The usual suspects.

Nothing obvious.

Which makes it worse.

My pulse kicks up—not fear exactly, more like... adrenaline. The same electric awareness I get right before a system breach. Right before chaos erupts.

I flex my fingers against the keyboard, resisting the urge to pull up the café’s security feeds. Whoever’s watching would notice that. And if they’re good enough to make me this twitchy, they’re good enough to know what I’m doing.

The question is why.

Back wall: two students studying for midterms, surrounded by energy drink cans and color-coded flashcards. Not them.

Left side: barista making lattes with mechanical precision, foam art worthy of its own Instagram account. No.

Right—

There.

A woman at the corner booth, partially hidden behind a textbook. Platinum blonde hair catching the afternoon light like spun silver. She’s not looking at me directly, but the angle of her shoulders, the tilt of her head... she’s hyper-aware of my position.

And she’s smiling into her book.

My pulse kicks up.

I return my attention to the screen, but my entire body has gone electric. Every nerve ending suddenly alive in a way they haven’t been since—fuck, since never. Not even during the most dangerous hacks. Not even when I cracked the Pentagon’s backup servers at seventeen just to prove I could.

This is different.

My fingers rest motionless on the keyboard. I should be running a trace. Should be pulling up facial recognition. Should be doing literally anything except sitting here like some starstruck freshman who just discovered his dick works.

But I don’t.

Because there’s something about the way she’s holding that textbook. Too casual. Too perfect. The pages haven’t turned in three minutes—I’ve been counting without meaning to.

She’s not reading.

She’s waiting.