Chapter 3 Alexi
ALEXI
Isettle into my usual corner table at the MIT café; laptop already open before my ass hits the chair. Back to the wall. Full view of exits. It’s the same spot I’ve claimed every Tuesday and Thursday for six months now.
Old habits. Or maybe just paranoia that’s kept me alive this long.
The barista doesn’t even ask my order anymore—double espresso, black, no sugar. She knows better than to add that oat milk bullshit the other trust fund kids request. I’m here for caffeine, not Instagram aesthetics.
My fingers fly across the keyboard, reviewing the Phantom’s last breach attempt. Three days of silence since my patch. Three days of wondering if she’s finally given up or just regrouping.
The espresso arrives. I don’t look up.
Code scrolls across my screen—beautiful, perfect, impenetrable. Or at least it should be. I’ve reinforced every vulnerability, sealed every crack. The Phantom should be completely locked out.
So why does my gut keep twisting?
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.
The espresso sits forgotten as my mind races through possibilities. Random student who recognized me? Unlikely—wrong body language. Federal agent? No, they lack subtlety, and she’s all controlled grace. A competitor trying to poach Ivanov’s secrets? Maybe, but the smile doesn’t fit.
That smile is pure amusement.
Like she knows something I don’t.
Like she’s playing a game, and I just realized I’m a piece on the board.
My laptop screen dims from inactivity. I don’t move to wake it. All my attention has narrowed to that corner booth, to platinum blonde hair and a smile I can feel even though I can’t quite see it.
The café noise fades—espresso machines hissing, students complaining about problem sets, someone’s terrible indie playlist bleeding from cheap headphones. All of it becomes white noise.
There’s only her.
And the electric certainty that everything just changed.
I push back from the table.
If someone’s watching me, I want to know why. And that smile—fuck, that smile—has been needling under my skin for the past five minutes like a splinter I can’t reach.
I leave the laptop open. Statement of intent: I’m not running, just... investigating.
Three steps toward her booth, and she moves.
Not panicked. Not rushed. She simply closes the textbook and stands in one seamless motion, like she’d been waiting for exactly this moment.
Her hair covers her face, so I don’t get a glimpse of it.
Then she’s gone.
Not walking—flowing through the café crowd like water finding cracks in stone. Students part without realizing they’re moving, and she’s already at the door before my brain catches up to what just happened.
“Fuck.”
I’m moving before conscious thought kicks in, weaving through tables with considerably less grace. A freshman’s backpack catches my hip. Someone’s latte nearly becomes a casualty.
“Watch it, asshole!”
I don’t apologize.
The door swings open, and cold November air slaps my face. Massachusetts Avenue spreads before me—busy afternoon traffic, students everywhere, the usual chaos of a Thursday near campus.
No platinum blonde.
I scan left, right, across the street. Nothing. She’s just... gone.
“What the fuck?”
A group of students flows past, headed toward the T station. I check between them, around them. Check the bookstore entrance fifty feet down. The coffee shop across the street. Every doorway, every alcove.
Nothing.
It’s like she vanished into thin air. Like she was never there at all.
Except she was. I saw her. Felt her eyes on me. Saw that smile that suggested she knew every secret I’ve ever buried in encrypted files.
My pulse hammers against my ribs. Not from the brief chase—from the absolute impossibility of someone disappearing that completely, that quickly, in broad daylight on a crowded street.
I pull out my phone, already opening the café’s security feed I shouldn’t have access to. My fingers fly across the screen, pulling up the last ten minutes of footage.
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 says gotcha.
“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 it amusing.
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.
If that was her—if the ghost just became flesh—then everything changes.
She’s not content staying in cyberspace anymore.
She’s hunting me now.