Page 7 of Hunt Me

There. Corner booth. Platinum blonde hair, black jacket, jeans. She’s real. Not some stress-induced hallucination from too many sleepless nights chasing the Phantom.

I watch her stand, and then myself start moving, before she exits.

Then I switch to the exterior cameras.

She walks out the door and?—

The feed glitches. Just for three seconds. Barely noticeable.

When it clears, she’s gone.

“No fucking way.”

I stare at my phone screen, watching that three-second glitch loop repeatedly.

No one just disappears like that. No one exits a building and vanishes from external cameras unless they know exactly where the blind spots are. Unless they’ve mapped the security grid down to the millisecond.

Unless they’ve done this before.

My thumb hovers over the playback controls, frozen.

The Phantom.

The thought hits like ice water down my spine.

Three weeks of chasing a ghost who slips through my defenses like smoke. Three weeks of following breadcrumbs that lead nowhere. Three weeks of feeling eyes on my systems, watching, learning, adapting.

And now eyes on me. Here. In the real world.

I replay the interior footage again. The way she held that textbook—motionless, unread. The perfect positioning to observe without being obvious. The timing of her exit, so precise it had to be calculated.

Platinum blonde hair.

My mind snags on that detail. The Phantom’s digital signature is all ice and precision. Cold, methodical, untouchable. Platinum blonde feels too on the nose, too perfect a visual metaphor.

Which means it’s probably deliberate.

I zoom in on her face in the one clear frame before she stands. High cheekbones. Those ice blue eyes. Expression carefully neutral except for that hint of a smile.

A smile that saysgotcha.

“Fuck.”

She was watching me hunt her. Sitting twenty feet away while I analyzed her breach patterns, reinforced my defenses, and convinced myself I’d finally sealed every crack. She watched me work and found itamusing.

The audacity alone makes my blood sing.

But it could be a coincidence, maybe a random student who recognized my face from gossip sites. Could be?—

The camera glitch plays again.

No. Random students don’t hack security feeds in real-time. Random observers don’t map camera blind spots with that kind of precision.

The Phantom has been digital for three weeks. Untouchable. Incorporeal.

What if she just showed me that she can reach into my physical world, too?

My hands shake slightly as I pocket my phone.