Page 73 of Hunt Me

Her jaw tightens, but she pulls the phone from her pocket and tosses it to me. “Satisfied?”

“No.”

Something flickers in her expression—hurt, maybe, or anger. Hard to tell through the walls she’s rebuilding between us.

“I’ll get a burner. Contact you in a few hours.”

“Don’t.” Nikolai steps forward. “If you need to communicate, use an encrypted channel Alexi sets up. Anything else is compromised.”

Iris nods once, then walks out.

The door clicks shut behind her with devastating finality.

“You’re just going to let her go?” Erik’s tone carries no judgment, only curiosity.

I move to the window, watching the street below. Iris emerges from the building, her small frame moving quickly toward the parking garage.

“I don’t know how high the threat is right now.” The admission costs me. “Morrison could be sitting on the breach, waiting to see what she does next. Or Sentinel could already be moving assets into position.”

“Then you let her walk into potential crosshairs,” Dmitri says.

“No.” I track Iris’s movement until she disappears. “I gave her enough rope to either hang herself or prove she can handle this.”

My chest feels hollow. Wrong.

20

IRIS

Maya is hunched over her laptop when I walk in.

She glances up, taking in my wrinkled clothes and probably the sex hair I haven’t bothered fixing. “Where the hell have you been?”

I drop onto the couch, exhaustion hitting hard now that adrenaline’s fading. “Alexi’s place.”

“Of course you were.” She closes her laptop. “While you were getting railed by your mortal enemy, I’ve been monitoring traffic on our networks. Someone pinged the backup server in Singapore twice in the last hour.”

“Probably routine.”

“At 4 AM? On a Saturday?” Maya stands, pacing. “What happened?”

I tell her everything. The Nightshade breach, Morrison’s payments from Sentinel Operations, and the government connection to my parents’ murder. Alexi’s promise to help. The meeting with his brothers.

By the time I finish, Maya’s gone pale.

“Pack a bag.”

“What?”

“Pack. A. Bag.” She’s already moving, grabbing her backpack from the closet. “We need to leave. Now.”

“Maya, stop.” I stand, blocking her path to the bedroom. “We covered our tracks. The decoys worked.”

“You breached a classified government system.” She shoves past me, yanking open dresser drawers. “You really think your little digital smoke show fooled the DoD?”

“It fooled them before.”

“Before, you weren’t actively investigating a black ops program that killed your parents and chasing the freaking dead-end they sent you after.” She throws clothes into the bag without folding them. “Before Morrison wasn’t getting paid to watch you specifically.”